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In this installment of Practical EMC, Ken Wyatt reviews real-time spectrum analyzers, helping you to pick the one best suited to your needs and within your price range.

About 150 years ago the first stable transatlantic cable was laid and messages were sent between Ireland and Newfound­land over copper. The data rate on this cable was not even 1 bit/sec, it was 0.1 bit/sec. Concerns over the cable reliabil­ity and the slow data rate led some to believe copper was doomed as a communication media for these long cables.

In this edition of Practical EMC, Ken Wyatt walks you through different spectrum analyzers and his experience with them, helping you to pick the one best suited to your needs. 

Steve Sandler was recently asked to measure a 25 mH inductor. Read on to find out what happened next.

Do I really need to use a power rail probe to measure ripple and noise? Power rail probes are single ended, so does that mean I can only monitor one power rail at a time? Are there other, more affordable options available? In this blog post, Steve Sandler answers to these questions and more.

Troubleshooting ESD is all about tracing the path of ESD current. In this installment of Practical EMC, Kenneth Wyatt illustrates how this can be done using the HP 457A current tracer probe, or a medium-sized H-field probe, and tracing the path using an oscilloscope. 

Modeling and measurement of digital serial interconnects is usually done in the frequency domain. That means that the minimal and maximal frequencies (or bandwidth) should be defined even before the analysis or measurement begins. This post introduces a simple and practical way to identify the bandwidth with a numerical analysis of defects in a single bit (SBR) or single symbol response (SSR).

This fundamentals piece looks at the digital applications of a coax cable, such as in testing USB4 implementations, with a focus on one pair of coax cables to highlight measuring some of their digitally oriented parameters not always considered on an RF based datasheet. 

This application note demonstrates use of HYPERLABS’ broadband coaxial components as general-purpose analog signal processing components for the generation of novel time-domain waveforms. The HL9474 6 dB resistive power divider and HL9462 Z-matched pick-off tee are demonstrated as lossy broadband summing networks. The HL9404 broadband balun is demonstrated as a pulse inverter and 180° signal splitter. The HL5567 PAM4 encoder is used to combine two pseudorandom binary or bit sequence (PRBS) patterns into PAM4 signaling. Utilizing the basic arithmetic functions of addition, inversion and subtraction, together with a time delay, a wide variety of novel broadband waveforms are generated. 

This application note builds on prior work reported in Picosecond Pulse Labs (PSPL) Application Note AN-20a^_[1]. In the referenced note, Jim Andrews, Ph.D. used PSPL pulse generators together with PSPL passive components to produce a variety of novel waveforms. A similar set of waveforms are demonstrated at higher bandwidths in this application note utilizing HYPERLABS’ industry leading broadband passive components.  

If you’ve just started on the path of designing high-speed serial links or have designed dozens of your own, Don Telian’s Signal Integrity in Practice is the book that will accelerate your engineering judgment and possibly save you from multiple design spins. Eric Bogatin takes a closer look at what he considers a must-have book for new and experienced engineers.