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How to use EMI hardened op amps to reduce your errors
Before the birth of EMI hardened amplifiers, system designers implemented their own filtering scheme. Some worked and others not so well. A common mishap is to insert a capacitor across the inputs of...
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Inductive sensing solution for beam scanning antenna arrays
This is a guest post written by Ahmad A. Gheethan, a PhD candidate at The Center for Wireless and Microwave Information Systems (WAMI) at the University of South Florida, and the first place winner of...
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Get Connected: SerDes demystified
Welcome back to the Get Connected blog series here on the Analog Wire! In the previous Get Connected blog post LVDS for multipoint applications we looked at the TIA/EIA-899 or MLVDS standard and a...
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Increasing dynamic performance in radar systems
If you’re designing automotive radar or even commercial or military radar systems, we are all bound by physics. I’d like to change that, but many of my old professors in college said “there are rules...
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Celebrate Limerick Day the engineer way
Today, May 12, is celebrated as Limerick Day. In case you haven’t heard of this highly revered holiday, Limerick Day is celebrated to honor of the birth of English writer Edward Lear. He’s credited...
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Capacitive-based galvanic isolation vs. optocoupler technology – who wins?
TI’s capacitive-based galvanic isolation technology differs from optocoupler-based isolation technology in a multitude of fashions, the most glaring of which is the implementation of the isolation....
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Hall sensors dominate the magnetic sensor market
Hall effect sensors have been the workhorse magnetic sensor for decades. Typically combined with a permanent magnet, they are used in a wide range of applications: electric motor control, switches,...
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How low is low power?
Are all of you familiar with the term micro power? For linear devices, this usually means a quiescent current of 50uA or less. More recently the term micro gave way to the term nano power, which...
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What you always wanted to know about TINA-TI but were afraid to ask! (Part 4)
This installment of the TINA-TI series is based on your requests from the list in Part 1. In this post we’ll learn how to generate:Time varying (piecewise linear) sourceFrequency varying sourceTime...
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Rediscover the Hall sensor
Modern day position sensing technology is incredibly reliable, low-cost and simple to implement. What does it take? A 3-pin device and a small magnetic material! (Actual size)ApplicationsHall effect...
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How to create modulated waveforms using fractional PLLs
We’ve likely all seen situations where we’ve needed to sweep the frequency over time. If you are faced with this, consider an application like radar where a transmitted signal is bounced off a target...
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Configurable AFEs change the future of power line communications
When I was a kid, someone from the power company regularly came to our house to read our electric meter so that we could be billed for our home's power consumption. Not only was this time consuming,...
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Inductive Sensing: How to use a tiny 2mm PCB inductor as a sensor
Recently, a customer asked me if he could use a tiny PCB coil as the sensing element for the LDC1000 inductance-to-digital converter (LDC). The PCB coil had only three turns per PCB layer on a...
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Challenges in high-speed communications
As many of you that work with high-speed signals may know… physics is not your friend – especially if you’re trying to design on lower-cost board materials, such as FR-4. When moving data at 10 Gbps...
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Get Connected: SerDes interfaces
Welcome back to the Get Connected blog series here on Analog Wire! In the previous Get Connected blog post SerDes Demystified we examined the serializing and de-serializing of parallel data through...
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Remembering Bob Pease
Today, on the third anniversary of Bob Pease’s passing, I am recalling the many things that he was famous for. He was known and respected as a guru on band-gap voltage references and a magician with...
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Upgrading the standard: a better way to drive peripherals
Our world is becoming automated. We see a strong initiative for more automation in our everyday lives, from smarter homes (AC, lighting and white goods) to easier and better travel in automobiles....
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Not all ESD specs cover the IEC ESD strike zone: Look for high IEC61000-4-2...
Summer is here, and with it comes some inevitable things… like baseball and the occasional summer thunderstorm. Who doesn’t love to take in a ball game and see the pitcher strike out a powerful hitter?...
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Inductive Sensing: Linear position sensing (Part 1)
Most people think inductive sensing is a method for measuring the distance between a coil and a conductive target, but there are many other use cases for the technology. For example, did you know that...
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Inductive Sensing: Linear position sensing (Part 2)
In my last blog post, Inductive Sensing: Linear position sensing (Part 1), I demonstrated how to implement a linear position sensor using a triangular target and a spiral coil. While good resolution...
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