Design

This article provides an overview of high-altitude electromagnetic pulses and the damaging effects they pose to sensitive electronic circuitry, equipment and systems that support a wide range of critical applications, along with common EMP protection approaches and current testing methods used to evaluate the resilience of equipment and systems exposed to an EMP attack.

Designing safe products powered by lithium-ion batteries requires an understanding of how the battery pack will behave while undergoing thermal runaway. In this work, fractional thermal runaway calorimetry is used to estimate the energy release from cells at different states of charge when undergoing a thermal runaway.

This article describes a laboratory experiment that shows the impact of the decoupling capacitors and a PCB trace length on the signal integrity in a CMOS inverter circuit.

This column outlines the steps to consider when embedding ESD detection capabilities into your system and overall design flow.

The trend of progressively migrating both ESD and EMC immunity from the system/board to the component level is creating unprecedented challenges for the component ESD designer.

Occasionally, we are asked to help develop shielding effective for near-field low-frequency (LF) magnetic fields, perhaps in a situation where some regulatory agency has imposed limits on LF magnetic field emissions of our product, and we are forced to comply.

The narrow ESD design window in current FinFET technologies creates a special challenge for the robust ESD design of high-speed interfaces. Smart circuit-ESD co-design can help achieve the required ESD robustness without deteriorating functional performance.

Although understanding each capacitor type and behavior is daunting and difficult to memorize, it is prudent that every aspiring engineer and technician involved in design for EMC at least have a rudimentary understanding of what capacitor technologies are available.

This article offers some useful insights and guidelines on how to effectively design and test systems using wide band gap devices to optimize product performance and achieve EMC compliance.

This article describes a practical way to improve signal integrity of typical interfaces on the PCB when using external ESD devices.