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If you have designed a controlled impedance transmission line based on a PCB stack-up, how do you know if the PCB fabrication house or another vendor built your stack-up to meet your controlled impedance specification?

Poorly designed interconnects can contribute to near field emissions, which is sometimes an indication of EMI failures, read on to see how to avoid failing an FCC test.

This article presents a quick and easy simulation model for filter performance analysis. The simulation model that the author built matches the test results quite well and it can serve as a useful and powerful tool for electronics design engineers.

“Over the years I’ve come to realize that, particularly in signal integrity, half-wave resonances are often the cause of ugly S-parameters. You can argue that any type of resonance would cause problems, and you would be right. However, half-wave resonances are easily formed in topologies.” This article summarizes observations from Gustavo Blando on the formation and mitigation of half-wave resonances, and includes an in-depth study on the topic in PDF format from the author.

How well do statistical models predict the behavior of real-world systems?  How can we make predictions about the likeliness and severity of worst-case system behavior?  In this article, the authors explain how they used a function generator and oscilloscope to collect varying population sizes of measurement parameter results in order to investigate the accuracy of a statistical model's predictions.

While eye diagrams and eye masks are both useful, they each hide as much information as they reveal. Read on to see how to get the most out of them for your design.

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.

A consideration that is often neglected is the impact of the self-resonant frequency (SRF) or parallel equivalent capacitance, Cp, which is related to SRF. In this article, Steve Sandler focuses on the impact of the inductor SRF on switching regulator performance.