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Ceramic capacitors: How far can you trust them?
There is a general trend of making electronics smaller and with more functionality. This translates into: “Cram it in there,” so naturally designers look to find smaller and smaller parts. What was on...
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Class 2 ceramic capacitors—can you trust them?
When Ceramic Capacitors Go Bad – Aging. Capacitor Aging applies to all Class 2 ceramic capacitors as they are built of ferroelectric materials. C0G types (Class 1) do not exhibit this aging effect,...
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Capacitors–the old decoupling standbys
As we have seen in part I and part II of this series [1], there are no inherent wear-out mechanisms in ceramic capacitors. And yes, as covered in part II, the high dielectric Class 2 capacitors (X7R)...
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Successful hardware projects start with…
Who hasn’t worked on a project that went nowhere or got canceled? Sometimes the project deserves it because it was ill-conceived or poorly executed. Sometimes markets moved or there wasn’t really a...
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The most useful application note I’ve ever read
I have read that we humans have to see or read some information many times until it sinks in, and we remember it. That’s probably true for information that you may casually need to know. Then there are...
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My favorite design idea of all time…
The editors of EDN will tell you that the Design Ideas section is the most popular section of the website, this goes back to the print editions, where that was the first section that most if not all...
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Managing chaos
There is one thing that many new engineers struggle with, something that is of great importance but is not taught often in undergraduate courses—methods of simple quality analysis and control. The...
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Metrics are good, but insight is best
A situation faced by all engineers when the schematic is complete is “Will my schematic fit on the given PCB area?”, and “How long will it take to do the layout?” I have faced these same questions for...
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A small, dedicated battery analyzer design
Like most things, advertised battery capacity is subject to a fair amount of specmanship [1]. The only way to know what you are buying is to test it yourself to determine if the product will meet your...
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An engineer’s playground: A tour of Silicon Labs’ labs
EDN was able to tour the Si Labs engineering facility in Austin during Embedded world North America. The headquarters were located a convenient 15 minute walk from the convention center, making it a...
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