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The complex impedance value over frequency for an electric vehicle’s battery cell is a good measure of the internal cell temperature, the state of charge (SoC), and the state of health. Moreover, comparing the battery stack impedance with the single cell impedances can reveal upcoming high contact resistances. Read on for the details of how to do it.

What are the greatest technical challenges facing connector designs for future high-speed deployments?Jairo Guerrero of Molex delves into the technical challenges for today’s connectors, the influence of applications such as automotive and data/telecom, and he gives an intriguing glimpse into the product development process at Molex.

The ability to analyze and predict the current/temperature effects of isolated traces is helpful, but the actual temperature of a trace may be different because of uncertainties in the actual trace thickness or board material thermal conductivity coefficient. This article traces the effort to see what PCB board parameters have the most impact in determining trace temperatures, followed by a look at related PCB design considerations. Read on to learn more.

SIJ gets Dr. McMillan’s take on what matters for noise generation in SI/PI design, and how PAM4 is arriving.

The goal of power integrity (PI) analysis is to ensure not only sufficient but also stable power to all chips in a system. This article uses the example of a DDR4 application to explain the choices surrounding the use of decoupling capacitors to reduce impedance, and which performance parameters are critical to success.

Recently, Signal Integrity Journal caught up with Todd Cutler, Keysight’s VP and General Manager for Design & Test Software about product development, innovation, and the latest developments in SI/PI design.

There seems to be more standards every day, and some have rumored that there is a movement to merge or consolidate some existing standards. We will examine some of the standards and how they came to be. For starters, we will limit ourselves to three main types of standards in the industry: on-board or internal, input/output (I/O), and networking. I/O and networking are similar, but networking standards typically apply to longer distance links than I/O standards. There is, as often happens, overlap between these types, and some, such as PCI-express, have standards that apply to more than one of them.

Optoelectronic industry designers have traditionally used discrete optical devices for transceiver designs. The process requires manual integration of discrete free-space optical components such as lasers, modulator, photo detectors, isolators, MUX/DE-MUX, lenses in the form of optical gold box sub-assemblies such as transmit optical sub-assembly (TOSA).

Understanding how to make and interpret power supply impedance is very useful for optimized, low noise power supply design. With a simple pair of homemade probes, it’s easy to make the measurements using a compact VNA. Read on to find out how.

Ask any engineer how to reduce the cross talk between two signal traces and the most common answer will be to add a guard trace. This should be the last resort, not the first choice. Guard traces can often introduce more problems than they solve.  Find out why in this article.