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Design, validate, and verify the most advanced schematics.
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Signal Integrity
EMI from Capacitor Heatsinks and What You Can Do About It
Selecting the right heatsink can help you keep your system cool and prevent EMI . While it may not be obvious, or while most designers may not think to check, heatsinks can generate EMI when they are connected to a switching element. This is a common problem in power supply design, and whenever a heatsink is placed in contact with a component that switches with high current draw at high frequency. Reducing EMI from heatsinks requires balancing
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Some Techniques for Suppressing DC-DC Converter EMI in IoT Products
This Li ion battery is most likely connected to a switching regulator to provide stable power. Suppressing EMI susceptibility in IoT devices from various sources is critical to ensuring your new product will work as designed. Similarly, your IoT product should limit spurious emissions if you want it to comply with EMC regulations. Among the various sources of radiated EMI from your next product, EMI within the device itself should also be
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Load Line Analysis for Nonlinear Circuits in Altium Designer
If you’re in the business of analog circuit design, then you’ll likely need to run simulations of your system to determine its functionality. Linear systems are rather intuitive, even in the case where strong feedback becomes an important determinant of stability. With nonlinear circuits, this can get more complicated, and it’s not always easy to see how the system operates unless you have some experience with similar systems. Transistors and
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Splitting Planes—The Good, The Bad And The Ugly
Splitting planes or making plane cuts is another one of those technical issues wherein there is a lot of conflicting information. Some say it’s a good thing to split power planes; others say you can split ground planes and power planes both, some say you make cuts only in power planes, and others say to avoid plane cuts altogether. This article will debunk the myths surrounding split planes, provide evidence as to when they are useful, and
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SMPS Circuit Design: Which Switching Frequency to Use?
Power supply on a network switch Power electronics and switched-mode power supply (SMPS) designers should know that working with higher switching frequencies can lead to higher switching losses in your system. However, the push to miniaturize power supplies, and the components that go into them, compels designers to work with higher switching frequencies in their SMPS circuit designs. This then creates problems where switching losses and noise
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Frequency Modulation Simulation in Altium Designer
When working with analog signals, you need to ensure your device is operating linearly in order to prevent problems like harmonic distortion during operation. Nonlinear interactions in analog devices lead to distortion that corrupts a clean analog signal. It may not be obvious when an analog circuit clips just from looking at your schematic or datasheets. Instead of tracing through your signal chain manually, you can use simulation tools to get
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Delay Tuning for High Speed Signals: What You Need to Know
Length matched lines in a PCB Take a look at two signal readouts on an oscilloscope, and you can see how length/timing mismatches between signal traces can improperly trigger downstream gates. The situation becomes worse when we look at the travel time for a master clock signal and the roundtrip time for sent/received data in different computer interfaces. SDRAM has solved this nicely by placing a clock in the slave device and sending a clock
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Radiated EMI Sources in High Speed/High Frequency PCBs
Radiated EMI measurements during EMC testing The image above shows a snapshot of results from an EMC test under CISPR requirements (U.S. uses FCC certification requirements). This product is right at the edge of Class B limits on radiated emissions. We can see a very complicated resonance spectrum in this plot with a large number of sharp peaks superimposed on wide peaks at lower level. What causes all of this radiated noise? There a number of
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How Absorbing Conformal Coatings Affect Your PDN and Radiated EMI
Signal integrity analysis and measurements go hand-in-hand I remember the first time I— back in my days of working with sensors —pumped nitrogen dioxide into a humid environmental chamber while evaluating a DUT. Over time, the surface of my copper leads slowly corroded as they sat unprotected in such a noxious environment. As my electronics experiment was living a double life as a chemistry experiment, I questioned whether to use a conformal
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Power Integrity Measurements for Your Prototype Board
We often write about signal integrity and power integrity around here, but there is one area where we sometimes fall short: test and measurement. Both aspects of building a new device are critical for ensuring your board will work as intended and meets stringent performance requirements. With advanced systems, the level of testing and measurements required to qualify a prototype for full-scale production spans far beyond using a multimeter. Power
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Follow Your Multilayer Ground Return Path to Prevent EMI
Following the path back to ground can quickly become complex in a complicated multilayer PCB. When your PCB has a small layer count (e.g., a 4-layer board with two plane layers), it becomes rather easy to determine the return path and deliberately design it to prevent EMI. The situation becomes more complicated when you’re working with higher layer counts. Multiple plane layers and conductors can form the ground return path, even if the conductor
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Signal Distortion in Your PCB: Sources and Solutions
Length matching for high-speed signals is all about synchronization... Signal distortion often gets a passing mention in many discussions on signal integrity and circuit analysis. As more networking products start running at higher speeds and use complicated modulation schemes, you’ll find that signal distortion becomes a serious problem that contributes to bit error rates. Distortion sources are cited as one of the primary bottlenecks preventing
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How to Create an Amplifier Simulation in Altium Designer
There are a variety of performance simulations you can run in Altium Designer. Read and understand the role of simulation and learn how to create and run an amplifier simulation in your schematic.
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Why is There a Transmission Line Critical Length?
There is a little secret that most literature on PCB design will not tell you. Read & find out what you need to know about determining the transmission line critical length in your PCB interconnects.
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Length Matching for High-speed Signals: Trombone, Accordion, and Sawtooth Tuning
Once upon a time, length matching guidelines for high-speed signals required a designer with enough skill to remain productive when manually applying different trace-length turning schemes. With today's advanced interactive routing features in modern PCB design tools, designers no longer need to manually draw out length tuning structures in a PCB layout. The remaining choice for a designer is deciding which length-matching scheme to use: trombone
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Never Cross a Ground Plane Gap in High Speed PCB Design
I often browse electronics and PCB forums, and I see the same question asked over and over: Why shouldn’t I route a trace over a split in my ground plane? This question gets asked by everyone from makers to professional designers who are just dipping their toes into high speed PCB design. For the professional signal integrity engineer, the answer should be obvious. Whether you’re a long-time PCB layout engineer or a casual designer, it helps to
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Tools for Transient Signal Analysis in Circuit Design
You can perform transient signal analysis with any of these circuits with the right simulator. I still remember my first differential equations class. One of the first topics that was discussed was damped oscillator circuits and transient signal response, which arises in many different physical systems. A transient response in an interconnect and on power rails in your PCB is a source of bit errors, timing jitter, and other signal integrity
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