Articles Tagged with ''impedance''

Impedance is the most fundamental and important electrical property of any component. With a very simple technique, anyone can simulate the impedance of any circuit in seconds using any version of SPICE, for free. Read on to learn more.

Now that I am teaching full time and have a number of undergraduate and graduate students doing weekly project reviews, I listen to more presentations than I give. I find myself giving the same feedback over and over again. So, I thought I would share my eight most common comments and tips to engineers giving presentations.

In this Extreme Measurement Example, see how measurements were used to resolve the shield resistance issue, where the authors redesigned the PCB to clear the DUT contact, but also identified alternate solutions in the event they could not wait for a new PCB.

In this tongue-in-cheek experiment that leads to actionable conclusions, Ben Dannan and Steve Sandler set out to discover a method to mitigate the lack of an isolation calibration step on a VNA.

Designing the right PCB stackup can make or break product performance. If the product has circuitry that is impedance and transmission loss sensitive, then paying attention to conductor surface roughness is paramount. Sometimes, however, the roughness of adjacent reference plane(s) is overlooked. If the adjacent high-speed signal layer uses smoother copper than one or both reference planes, a higher insertion loss than expected for that layer will occur and possibly cause a product to fail compliance. So, how is this determined before finalizing the stackup? Read on to find out.

Understanding a few simple power integrity (PI) fundamentals can go a long way towards increasing design margins when delivering power to high-speed digital loads. In this piece, Heidi Barnes provides some fundamental lessons on impedance.

Stefaan Sercu, Samtec Signal Integrity R&D Engineer, recently presented “Impedance Corrected De-Embedding,” which discussed the advantages of impedance corrected de-embedding over standard 2X through de-embedding, here are some highlights of his talk.

I often get questions from my fellow design engineers from around the world asking why we should or should not use S parameters or Z parameters for power distribution network (PDN) designs or validation.  The truth is, we should be familiar with both, because depending on our design and validation tools, one or the other may be better suited for the task. Read on to find out why.

Measuring low impedance components with a 2-port vector network analyzer (VNA) is an essential technique that typically requires a VNA that costs more than $20,000. In this article, see how the authors measured an MLCC using $500 and an open-source simulation tool.

We want to follow this mantra of 85 ohms for PCIe, but it may not be so easy. Here’s a look at exactly what the spec says, and what we can do about it.