Electronic – Grounding unused leg of bussed resistor

groundingresistors

I've got a bussed resistor:

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The package I'm using has 13 inputs and 1 output, tied to ground. I'm only using 11 of the inputs. Do I need to worry about the floating end of the two unused inputs? Should I tie them to ground?

Best Answer

Leave them disconnected. If you connect them to ground, and your input is >0V (with respect to ground), you will be creating unnecessary current draw in your circuit.

Note that this is different from having unused pins on a microcontroller, where you might tie them to ground (or Vcc, depending on configuration) to prevent undesirable side-effects when reading values from an ADC, getting random resets on a reset pin, etc.