2023-03-20 - Brian Dipert

Thunderbolt: Good industry-standard intentions undone by proprietary implementations

Industry standardization may sound good when it rolls off company reps’ tongues, but a dearth of hardware and software interoperability renders it nothing more than meaningless hype.

2023-03-16 - Jean-Jaques (JJ) DeLisle

A short primer on OTRA and OTIA amplifier devices

OTRAs/OTIAs perform current-to-voltage conversion, much like a resistor, but they exhibit enhanced input and output characteristics.

2023-03-14 - John Dunn

Analyzing energy loss in a capacitor circuit

Deriving the energy loss of a circuit via two different analysis methods and coming to the same interesting conclusion.

2023-03-13 - Steve Hageman

Metrics are good, but insight is best

Answering the questions "Will my schematic fit on the given PCB area?" and "How long will it take to do the layout?" with a statistical approach.

2023-02-22 - Jean-Jaques (JJ) DeLisle

Variable attenuators for receiver sensitivity testing

The goal of receiver sensitivity test is to determine the lowest power signal a receiver can detect under a variety of conditions.

2023-02-20 - Brian Dipert

Benchmarking memory on an inexpensive PC

How do system memory speed, per-module capacity, and total system capacity affect PC performance results? The answer, as always, is "it depends".

2023-02-13 - Jean-Jaques (JJ) DeLisle

A short primer on analog current conveyor circuits

Current conveyor (CC) circuits allow a relatively small variation in voltage and are used in a variety of complex electronic applications.

2023-02-10 - Steve Hageman

Managing chaos

Using simple quality analysis and control with XmR charts to monitor critical processes continually without personal bias.

2023-02-07 - Brian Dipert

Streaming music reception: Implementation differentiation

20+ year old tech devices still hold a special place in this engineer's heart, one that newer offerings haven't (yet, at least) been able to replace.

2023-02-06 - John Dunn

A look at conical inductors

An analysis of a conical coil as the RF choke in a bias-tee.