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Is Rohm closer to acquiring Toshiba’s power chip business?
As Rohm Semiconductor deepens its ties with Toshiba Electronic Devices & Storage, industry watchers wonder if Rohm is getting closer to acquiring Toshiba’s power chips business. It all began late...
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Improve thermal airflow sensor PSRR with just two resistors
Self-heated transistors used as thermal air flow sensors are a particular (obsessive?) interest of mine, and over the years I must have designed dozens of variations on this theme. Figure 1 illustrates...
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Sampling and aliasing
If we want to take samples of some analog waveform, as in doing analog to digital conversions at some particular conversion rate, there is an absolute lower limit to the rate of doing conversions...
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Change of guard at Intel Foundry, again
A little more than a year after he took the reins of Intel’s ambitious bid for semiconductor contract manufacturing, Stuart Pann is retiring while handing over the charge to Kevin O’Buckley. The...
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The 2024 Google I/O: It’s (pretty much) all about AI progress, if you didn’t...
Starting last year, as I mentioned at writeup publication time, EDN asked me to do yearly coverage of Google’s (or is that Alphabet’s? whatevah) I/O developer conference, as I’d already long been doing...
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Thin PCBs: Challenges with BGA packages
During electrical design process, certain design choices need to be made. One example is USB C type connector-based design with a straddle-mount connector. In such scenario, the overall PCB thickness...
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Bias for HF JFET
Junction field-effect transistors (JFETs) usually require some reverse bias voltage to be applied to a gate terminal. In HF and UHF applications, this bias is often provided using the voltage across...
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Navigating energy efficiency in O-RAN architectures
Open radio access network (O-RAN) technology is driving the mobile communication industry toward an open, virtualized, and disaggregated architecture. O-RAN breaks traditional hardware-centric RANs...
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Tiny transformer helps trim power supply noise
Murata’s L Cancel Transformer (LCT) neutralizes the equivalent series inductance (ESL) of a capacitor to optimize its noise-reducing capabilities. Leveraging nonmagnetic ceramic multilayer technology,...
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Position sensor suits vehicle safety systems
The Melexis MLX90427 magnetic position sensor is intended for applications requiring high automotive functional safety levels, such as steer-by-wire systems. It provides stray field immunity and EMC...
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DC/DC converters shrink car body electronics
ST’s A6983 step-down synchronous DC/DC converters provide space savings in light-load, low-noise, and isolated automotive applications. The series offers flexible design choices, including six...
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Equalizer IC eases DOCSIS 4.0 CATV upgrades
A single-chip inverse cable equalizer, the QPC7330 from Qorvo allows CATV operators to upgrade their hybrid fiber coax (HFC) networks to DOCSIS 4.0. The QPC7330 streamlines field installation by...
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Rack-mount oscilloscopes are just 2U high
The MXO 5C series of low-profile oscilloscopes from R&S provides a bandwidth of up to 2 GHz and either four or eight channels. Although they lack displays, the rack-mount scopes deliver the same...
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Ethernet adapter chips aim to bolster AI data center networking
At a time when scalable high-bandwidth and low-latency connectivity is becoming critical for artificial intelligence (AI) clusters, the new 400G PCIe Gen 5.0 Ethernet adapter chips aim to resolve...
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Relay and solenoid driver circuit doubles supply voltage to conserve...
A generally accepted fact about relays and solenoids is that after they’re driven into the actuated state, only half as much coil voltage and therefore only one fourth as much coil power, are required...
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Why verification matters in network-on-chip (NoC) design
In the rapidly evolving semiconductor industry, keeping pace with Moore’s Law presents opportunities and challenges, particularly in system-on-chip (SoC) designs. Notably, the number of transistors in...
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Looking inside a laser measurer
Tape measures are right up there with uncooperative-coiling (and -uncoiling) extension cords and garden hoses on the list of “things guaranteed to raise my blood pressure”. They don’t work reliably...
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Unleashing the potential of industrial and commercial IoT
We’re in the fourth industrial revolution, commonly referred to as Industry 4.0, where advanced technologies are reshaping the landscape of manufacturing and business. The idea of machines...
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Power Tips #129: Driving high voltage silicon FETs in 1000-V flybacks
The 800 V automotive systems enable higher performance electric vehicles capable of driving ranges longer than 400 miles on a single charge and charging times as fast as 20 minutes. 800 V batteries...
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Analog TV transmitter—analog problem
In the late 1980s the television station I worked at was still using an early 1970s transmitter, an RCA TT-50FH (50 kW, Series F, High-band VHF). The transmitter was made with three cabinets: two 25 kW...
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