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The intrepid power systems designer should know all about MOSFETs and their particular electrical peculiarities, but working with arrays of MOSFETs can be another beast. One arrangement you might see in a power conversion system is to place multiple power MOSFETs in parallel. This shares the load among multiple MOSFETs with the goal of reducing the burden on the individual transistors in your system. Unfortunately, MOSFETs (and nonlinear...

Intel’s upcoming platform for neuromorphic computing, the Loihi neuromorphic processor, reflects a broader trend in the AI hardware community, but you wouldn’t know it from looking at the packaging. The Loihi processor packs major changes to the underlying transistor architecture and uses a unique signaling method used for computation. Intel’s products and other chips from hardware startups are starting to resemble the functionality in the human...

Sometimes, the distinction between what qualifies as a “slow” or “fast” signal can seem arbitrary, and it might depend on who you ask. A related topic is whether a PCB trace is considered electrically “short” or “long,” and you might find just as much disagreement on the topic. Whether you need to route slow or fast signals in your PCB, your traces will need to follow some PCB routing rules to ensure your board functions as intended. Like many...

If you ever read about transmission lines and integrated circuit datasheets, there is this seemingly mysterious quantity called load capacitance. This value depends on the geometry of the component lead connected to the transmission line, as well as the substrate material and distance to the reference plane on the integrated circuit die. When working with transmission lines, the load capacitance of a component has some important effects on signal...

When you’re designing digital boards, the bandwidth of your signal is not usually considered unless you’re working on extremely fast designs. The digital world is really a summation of multiple ranges within the analog world. In other words, many analog effects sum with each other to create the effects that are seen as normally being confined to digital systems. This is such an extensive subject that it has spawned its own field of mathematics...

Over the past decade, the USB landscape has gotten more complex, thanks to a host of power and data rate standards, as well as connectors and a host of PHY components. USB 4 is getting closer and will nicely integrate Intel’s Thunderbolt 3.0 specs into this familiar standard. Aside from faster data rates, USB 4 will integrate advanced charging features in the USB-PD standard. You’ll only need a single charger for all your USB Type-C devices. So...

Virtually every printed circuit board made in recent history has an oscillator of some form on it, and most integrated circuits contain oscillators too. You may be wondering, just what is an oscillator? Oscillators are essential components that produce a periodic electronic signal, typically a sine wave or square wave. Oscillators convert DC signal to periodic AC signals which can be used to set frequency, be used for audio applications, or used...

From the time my company received its first job involving Ethernet, we always “Bob Smith” with gusto. It wasn’t until I was asked to write an article on Ethernet grounding for Signal Integrity Journal that I ever gave Bob Smith termination in Ethernet circuits a second thought. As I started to dig on the internet, I started to find some objections to Bob Smith termination. Some of these objections were purely conceptual, while others were backed...

In this on-demand session, we will demonstrate the current routing and tuning features and capabilities of Altium Designer. Also, a sneak peek at what is coming in Altium Designer 21. If you are interested in experiencing the world's finest PCB design product for yourself, request your free trial today and see why more Engineers and Designers choose Altium Designer than any other product available! Would you like to find out more about how...