Circulating currents: The warnings are out By Paul Rako, Technical Editor
Understanding how to avoid or minimize the effects of circulating currents can make your designs more robust. Every engineer should know the techniques for neutralizing this insidious phenomenon.
Design Features
Medical devices demand stringent isolation techniques By Charles H Small, Contributing Technical Editor
Safety regulations for medical devices mandate isolated power supplies and I/O lines. The goal of these regulations is simple: Don't electrocute the patient. You can use a variety of techniques, including transformers, optoisolators, and advanced isolation ICs.
Designing dual-modulus dividers in an FPGA By Brian Boorman, Harris Corp
A technique from deep in the digital designer's dusty bag of tricks may be just the ticket for generating moderate-speed clocks in programmable logic.
Dynamic frequency scaling optimizes SOC performance By Colin MacDonald and Anis Jarrar, Freescale Semiconductor
A clock-extension scheme allows a design to run at its target operating frequency when the system is not accessing the key slow path and to slow down when it is.
Five questions about resistors By Gene Howell, TT Electronics, IRC Boone Division
Understanding this ubiquitous part can help you avoid common circuit problems.
Modeling skin effect in Spice By Cecil Deisch, Tellabs Operations Inc
Skin effect causes increased losses as frequency increases. It also causes changes in signal velocity, degrading signal fidelity, especially the eye opening of high-speed data signals on long signal paths on pc boards and backplanes.
The thermal cost of performance By Joshua Israelsohn, Contributing Technical Editor
Electric-energy efficiency serves as one measure of how far the electronics industry has come. Explore how lighting, measurement instrumentation, and audio amplification highlight the thermal challenges that engineers face.
Does virtualization drive the future? By Ron Wilson, Executive Editor
The ability of electronic systems to simulate reality has made them more intelligent. Could it make them self-creating?
