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We all talk about the Industrial Revolution. The world has gone through a number of “Industrial Revolutions” since the creation of steam power in England. In fact, we talk about three such revolutions since that first one. In the early 2010s, the German Government proposed a fourth industrial revolution they called INDUSTRU 4.0. Today we also call it “The Smart Factory”! But, to date, there hasn’t been too much reported progress in this program...

Depending on your background and personal experiences, two things may spring to mind when you hear the term “cocktail party problem.” The first is you thinking, “there are never enough cocktails to satisfy everyone’s requirements,” but maybe I’m projecting again. Alternatively, you may be considering how difficult it is for an artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled voice-controlled assistant like Amazon’s Alexa to follow individual voices when a...

Industry 4.0 is surely on the horizon, and with the rate at which technology advances, many advanced products will be 3D printed in part or in full. The industrial IoT paradigm is already transforming the way many manufacturers operate and is helping usher innovation in a number of advanced industrial and consumer products. The electronics industry is no stranger, and an array of new 3D printing systems and a broad range of materials now allow...

Ohm’s law: it’s a wonderful tool we have for analyzing all types of circuits. This simple relation applies to so many devices that it’s quite easy to explain many aspects of component behavior with this single equation. With high voltage PCBs, however, we have to use other tools in addition to Ohm’s law to understand some important aspects of circuit behavior. Bring in Paschen’s law and Kirchoff’s laws, and you have everything you need to...

One of the primary benefits of using a flexible circuit versus a rigid PCB board or wire and cable is the savings in weight and space. Flexible materials are thin, extremely light weight, and allow you to package in 3D, bending and folding to make necessary connections, allowing you to shrink the overall package size or fit additional electronics in a similarly-sized unit. As an example, a very typical two-layer construction for a flexible...

Recently, I have been working on a 300W LED panel project. I’ve already written an article about building a 65W LED driver, and another about simulating it on PDN analyzer. However, there are some features I still want to implement, one of which is wireless dimming capability on the panels. Wireless dimming is important because getting the perfect balance of light is difficult when you have to keep pulling a light down from the top of a tall pole...

In printed electronics, I approach design philosophy from a new perspective. My key question regarding design philosophy relates to printed electronics manufacturing: Should I optimize my layout for electrical performance or manufacturability, even if that means compromising electrical characteristics? In printed electronics design, I must make trade-offs between trace resistance, voltage levels, power consumption, and layout area. By properly...

Signal integrity expert, Dr. Eric Bogatin, joins us in this episode to talk about the upcoming DesignCon conference and expo that will be held in Santa Clara, CA January 28th through January 30th. Dr. Bogatin shares information about the presentations he’ll be giving; this includes a 2-part S-Parameter master class, speed training about understanding TDR measurements, and a session tackling tricks the experts use to get more out of their...