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On the first day of the 2019 IEEE EMC Symposium, Louann Mlekodaj, Eriko Yamato, Patrick DeRoy and other members of the EMC YP committee organized a Jeopardy game for the Young Professionals Group. As fitting the format of the Jeopardy show at an EMC event, answer categories covered, of course, EMC, SI and PI topics. Read on to test yourself!

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.” 

Obtaining accurate measurement data requires either accurate knowledge and accounting for the probe and fixture influence OR calibration methodology to remove these effects prior to measurement.

Read on for a history of Touchstone and find out how you can shape its next iteration.

At PCIM 2019 last month, imec announced a functional GaN half-bridge monolithically integrated with drivers. The release described how mounted on a buck-convertor test board, the chip converts an input voltage of 48 V to an output voltage of 1 V, with a pulse width modulation signal of 1 MHz. The achievement leverages on imec’s GaN-on-SOI and GaN-on-QST® technology platforms, reducing parasitic inductance and boosting commutation speed.

A TDR (time domain reflectometer) is an instrument that probably has the fastest rise time of any instrument in your lab, but how accurate is it? Eric tests accuracy using a DC Ohmmeter in this piece.

There was a time when the signal integrity of connections between digital ICs could be nearly ensured by following one simple rule: don’t connect more than some maximum number of input pins to any single output pin. Often the fanout limit would be around 7. No models, no simulations. Everything we needed was in the thick books of vendor datasheets that filled our shelves, the tree-killing viral precursor to AOL installation CDs. Ah, those were the days!

I received a demo version of a new quick and easy TDR. I decided to take it for a test drive by measuring all the cables I had lying around my lab. The results were surprising!

If performance matters, if the interconnects are not transparent, or if you want to develop good habits, you will want to incorporate these seven habits in your next two layer board design.

A micromodule device resembles a surface mount IC; however, they include all the necessary support components that would normally be used to construct a power conversion circuit. This includes a DC/DC controller, MOSFET dice, magnetics, capacitors and resistors and so on, all mounted on a thermally efficient laminate substrate. They are then encapsulated using a plastic mold cap. The result was a complete power supply that can be simply adhered to a printed circuit board. Read about the evolution of this device.