Fundamentals

This article is the second in our ongoing series about batteries. This installment provides an overview of lithium-ion batteries – typical properties, principal applications, and trends.

Pressure to get product to market is stressful, as well as full of scenarios that most engineers and designers would like to forget about. Yet in the beehive of activity, the regulations that a product must comply with are critical to those design engineers, as well as other teams. So much, in fact, that a slight misstep early on or during the product life cycle can create devastating circumstances. Driven by market or other business issues some may succumb to the “limp factor” (LF): get it to work and ship at all costs for the first country or countries of use and worry about the others at a later time when the pressure is off. So, how can we prevent the LF from occurring?

In Part 2 of this series we indicated that a key element in a successful static control program was the identification of those items (components, assemblies and finished products) that are sensitive to ESD and the level of their sensitivity. Damage to an ESDS device by the ESD event is determined by the device’s ability to dissipate the energy of the discharge or withstand the current levels involved. This is known as device “ESD sensitivity” or “ESD susceptibility.”

Military EMC design can be particularly vexing. Multiple environments combined with multiple threats lead to multiple requirements. The threat levels, and the resulting requirements, are usually more stringent than found in the commercial world.

Unlike so many technologies in use today, horn antenna history actually started more than a hundred years ago. This short article introduces the reader to the history of horns from the early experiments of radio pioneers to the “horn boom” during the 1940s and 1950s. The article ends with the latest evolution of horn antennas.