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What was once confined to the most advanced aerospace applications is now commonplace enough to be found in our everyday lives. Insulation, CCDs, air purifiers, and other technologies wouldn’t be possible without a robust space program in the 1960s and 1970s. One less well-known technology that deserves such attention is remote sensing, which has been used casually and for scientific research since the first American and Russian space flights. R...

With all the possible wireless communication protocols available for use in a mobile device, it can be difficult to keep them straight. Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) and LTE-M are two low-bandwidth protocols that provide remote monitoring capabilities over several miles of distance. While the data rates are quite low in both protocols, these protocols are excellent choices for lightweight embedded systems, such as small sensor arrays, industrial or...

Just about every place you look these days when you talk about high-speed PCB design, the signaling required for a product is, by default, differential signaling. But, differential signaling was not always at the forefront of product development. The original method of moving data was single-ended signaling. And, in some instances, it is still in use today. This article will describe the differences between single-ended vs differential...

With the multitude of signal integrity problems that can arise in real PCBs, how can the astute designer distinguish them all? Some problems are clearer than others, with specific signal integrity measurements being developed for testing and measuring particular aspects of signal behavior. One question that arises has to do with the appearance of a fluctuation in the output voltage on a banks of I/Os, known as simultaneous switching noise or...

An impedance matching network is important for power transfer and preventing reflections. Rather than looking at power transfer, voltages, and currents, RF engineers normally look at S-parameters to evaluate impedance matching circuits as 2-port networks. In particular, the relevant quantities for impedance matching are normally insertion loss and return loss, which can be calculated using S-parameters for a 2-port impedance matching network. Her...

Just like driver and receiver components connected to transmission lines, antennas need to be impedance matched to their feed lines. Some common matching schemes that also provide filtration are built as LC networks, where capacitors and inductors are placed as series and shunt elements in the antenna impedance matching network. With multi-band antennas, wideband antennas, or extremely narrow-band antennas, these networks can get quite...

With more devices running at faster edge rates and higher frequencies, power integrity can’t be considered separate from signal integrity. In any digital PCB design, the PDN needs to be carefully engineered to provide stable power with low transient ringing. The steps required in digital systems mirror those used in analog systems, but there are some exceptions in analog systems due to the very narrow analog signal bandwidth in these boards. Dig...

Anyone who has taken apart an old cell phone or designs IoT devices knows multiple communication capabilities are present in these designs, each requiring different antennas. The RF designer should already take precautions for interconnect isolation, but antenna isolation is just as important when modeling and designing wireless systems. The most basic antenna isolation technique simply requires placing antennas farther apart and designing the...

Crosstalk is a fundamental aspect of signal integrity, both in single-ended and differential trace. The spacing between signal lines with each routing configuration is defined using typical rules of thumb, which can be easily defined as design rules in your PCB design software. One rule of thumb for defining differential pair spacing between each trace is the “5S” rule, sometimes called the “5W” rule in application notes and other PCB design...