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Just because someone has a VNA capable of 60 GHz bandwidth doesn’t mean it will always give the same results. It is not the instrument, but the measurement procedure that seems to influence the quality of the measurements the most.  Read on for information on a recent study from Jason Ellison, Heidi Barnes, and Jose Moreira  as well as 7 tips for improving your measurements.

Get six experts in a room together and you are likely to hear seven different opinions. Not so at the Future of Power Integrity Panel Discussion at DesignCon 2019.  The consensus of this panel of experts is that the future of power integrity will include single processor chips drawing as much as 1000 A and more. Read on for the details of this discussion!

While we all love increased network speed, there is an implied assumption that the backbone speeds of the internet will keep up with this rising demand placed upon it by millions of new 5G devices. PCIe 5.0 (or Gen5) represents the technology that is needed by the computer, data center, and ultimately the 5G wireless industry to enable the next generation of mobile and desktop applications. So, what is PCI Express 5.0 and how does it compare to PCI 4.0? Read on to find out.

eSilicon was in the Samtec booth at DesignCon 2019 presenting their collaboration with Wild River Technology to develop an advanced test system that addresses the difficult signal integrity demands of 56/112G PAM4 operation. The test system design utilizes the upcoming IEEE P370 standard in association with compliance metrics 802.3bs, OIF CEI – 56G PAM4, and COBO to validate the required performance.

Now that you have been working in industry for some years, you know what you regret not learning when you had the chance. This book is your second chance.  Read on for a book review of Electric Circuits, a Primer, by JC Oliver, published by Artech House, 2018.

In high-speed circuit designs, power integrity (PI) and electromagnetic interference (EMI) are connected together. When the edge of the cavity created by power (PWR) and ground (GND) planes in PCBs radiates, the peak frequencies in the emissions are the same as the peak frequencies in the cavity self-impedance.

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.

The power electronics engineer and the power integrity engineer share a common goal: provide the system with the correct voltages, currents, and noise characteristics to achieve the desired performance. Unfortunately, they do not share much else. They generally use different tools, vocabulary, and figures of merit. As a result, both sides lose.