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Know your FPGA

Rich Miron, Digi-Key Technical Content Team November 16, 2015 Comments Off on Know your FPGA

The field programmable gate array (FPGA) has become a key component in many designs. Their flexibility makes it possible to individually customise hardware for very low volume applications. The FPGA’s... Read More

Balancing the tradeoffs in 3-Phase BLDC motor-control designs

Brian Chu of Microchip Technology Inc., compares the advantages and disadvantages of different approaches to BLDC motor control. November 16, 2015 Comments Off on Balancing the tradeoffs in 3-Phase BLDC motor-control designs

Brushless DC (BLDC) motors are gaining increased market share over other motor technologies, particularly in the automotive and medical markets, and this has prompted the development of new approaches to... Read More

Advantages of Cascading Reflectionless Filters

Ming Hao Yan, Mini-Circuits November 16, 2015 Comments Off on Advantages of Cascading Reflectionless Filters

Cascading filters in series is commonly used to enhance stopband rejection and steepness in the transition band.  The technique can also be used to combine high pass and low pass... Read More

Techniques for Improving Impedance Mismatch

Kalaiselvan Raghavan and Giridharan Krishnamurthy, Mini-Circuits November 16, 2015 Comments Off on Techniques for Improving Impedance Mismatch

Introduction Impedance matching is a complex subject cloaked in a certain degree of mystery.  Whenever a circuit fails or systemic problems are encountered, impedance matching is most often attributed as... Read More

Accelerating Spur Searches by up to 500 Times with High-performance Spectrum Analysis in a Vector Network Analyzer

Keysight Technologies, Inc.* *Keysight Technologies Inc., formerly Agilent Technologies electronic measurement business November 11, 2015 Comments Off on Accelerating Spur Searches by up to 500 Times with High-performance Spectrum Analysis in a Vector Network Analyzer

Whether an engineer is designing, developing or testing a new component, they will often use a network analyzer and a spectrum analyzer to fully understand the device under test (DUT).... Read More

Quantum dots made from fool’s gold boost battery performance

David Salisbury, Vanderbilt November 11, 2015 Comments Off on Quantum dots made from fool’s gold boost battery performance

If you add quantum dots – nanocrystals 10,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair – to a smartphone battery it will charge in 30 seconds, but the... Read More

Simulating and Testing of Signal Processing Methods for Frequency Stepped Chirp Radar

Frank Raffaeli, Principal RF/microwave Engineer, NI and Trang D. Nguyen, Master Project Manager, NI November 10, 2015 Comments Off on Simulating and Testing of Signal Processing Methods for Frequency Stepped Chirp Radar

Modern radar systems serve a broad range of commercial, civil, scientific and military applications. In addition to the traditional application areas of military, weather and law enforcement, radar technology is... Read More

Product How-to: Integrated isolation and power bridges the gap between USB and traditional industrial interfaces

Conal Watterson, Analog Devices November 10, 2015 Comments Off on Product How-to: Integrated isolation and power bridges the gap between USB and traditional industrial interfaces

Introduction As a standard for serial communication to peripheral devices, USB is ubiquitous today. However, industrial devices still rely in many cases on the older standard of RS-232 for debug... Read More

In the mix

Brian Tompson, Stephen Allen November 10, 2015 Comments Off on In the mix

Correctly mixing the output of RGB LEDs is an art, but can be helped with a demonstration board and a PIC12 processor Graphic artists want to create accurate colour matches... Read More

Think big but start small: Tapping into rich analytics with IoT

Jerry Lee - Microsoft's director of product marketing, Data Platform and IoT November 2, 2015 Comments Off on Think big but start small: Tapping into rich analytics with IoT

If you’re a business owner or enterprise beginning to leverage the Internet of Things (IoT), chances are you’ve started connecting your operational technologies – including machinery, building HVAC, and other... Read More