Articles Tagged with ''design''

DesignCon, the premier high-speed communications and system design conference, returns to its home at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, Calif., with technical paper sessions, tutorials, industry panels, product demos, and exhibits, January 30 to February 1, 2024. Group Event Director Suzanne Deffree reflects on the resources, networking, and innovation that DesignCon 2024 will bring.

Samtec, Inc. has announced the grand opening of its new design and manufacturing center in Taiwan.

Würth Elektronik now offers a comprehensive library of components for Altium designers on GitHub.

Keysight's complete emulation solution identifies the impact of variables affecting the battery drain of internet of things devices to enable design improvements.

Past and present officers gather to celebrate IBIS – and cut the cake!

Most of today’s digital-based products create a large amount of on-board RF harmonic “noise” (EMI). While this digital switching won’t usually bother the digital circuitry itself, that same harmonic energy from digital clocks, high-speed data buses, and especially on-board DC-DC switch-mode power supplies can easily create harmonic interference well into the 600 to 850 MHz cellular phone bands and even as high as 1575 MHz GPS/GNSS bands, causing receiver “desense” (reduced receiver sensitivity).

In the high-speed connector design arena, there are two opposing ideas. For some people, if you simply put pieces of plastic and metal together, eventually you have a signal transmission. This process is very simple. On the other end of the spectrum, there is the idea that a solid connector design requires a deep understanding of electromagnetic theory, a wisdom only sorcerers and wizards possess.

Engineers invest tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars in signal integrity simulation software—the goal being to gain an accurate understanding of how signals are going to behave in the final product. But how do you do that early in the design process without reliable, verifiable electrical properties for the dielectrics incorporated into your design?

My friend Steve Sandler pointed out a major hurdle we face in power distribution design: power engineers (who design power converters) and power integrity engineers (who design system bypassing-decoupling networks) use different vocabulary, techniques, and requirements. To understand a little better how we got here, I want to start with a prediction I heard sometime in the early 90s at one of the conference keynote speeches: “In 10 to 20 years, computers will look like hairy steamy golf balls.” 

My aging vibration system started faulting. Shaking for 30 years takes a toll on a thing, after all. The system is pretty straightforward, just a big stack of audio amps and a controller. Much to my lab manager’s chagrin, I had been intentionally ignoring the warning signs.