Power Integrity

RSS

The key benefits of gallium nitride (GaN) are, amongst others, high power density, best-in-class efficiency and decreased system costs. Infineon Technologies AG is starting volume production for CoolGaN™ products by the end of 2018, the company announced during PCIM Europe.

For this project, we will use an Atmel 328 microcontroller demo board, prepared with firmware to control it explicitly for our purposes, and with coaxial cables connected between the I/O pins and the input to the active probes of the scope. This interconnect provides a high bandwidth transmission line path for the signals.

If the die's I/O power rails are shared by the core power rails, here's a way to get your core power-rail measurements anyway.

How do you achieve high bandwidth in your measurements while minimizing current load on your DUT? Given that your DUT is a power rail, you really don't want to draw too much current from it., or your measurement system will distort the rail. But these two measurement criteria are at loggerheads with each other. It's a quandary, and it has to do with the fundamental nature of signals on interconnects.

Measuring the noise on a power rail seems to be a straightforward task. However, there are some basic pitfalls that can cause incorrect, or even downright strange, results. Let's look at one of these challenges: RF pickup. We'll demonstrate the effect of RF pickup on a power-rail measurement, and then we'll show you an effective means of mitigating that effect.

TDK Corporation announced that today TDK acquired Faraday Semi LLC, a U.S.-based venture-backed company engaged in the design of advanced power semiconductor ICs. Faraday Semi is now a wholly owned subsidiary of TDK.

Eric Bogatin will lead this special session again at EDI CON USA, taking on the topic of how to deliver more than 100A with less than 10 mV of noise to digital devices. See how you can get involved.

Power conversion circuits with control loop(s) are everywhere in electronic systems. We must establish stability and performance metrics for control loops and their circuits. However, generally accepted metrics may not be good enough. Is a crossover frequency with 45 degrees of phase margin and 10 dB of gain margin enough? How can we relate phase margin to peaking in the impedance profile and transient noise requirements? This article aims to answer these and other questions.

VRMs and VRM controllers are often selected based on size, efficiency, price, or a relationship with the manufacturer. This often leads to a poor VRM selection, requiring additional engineering resources, greater time to market, as well as, higher BOM costs to correct the deficiencies. In this article, we evaluate the choices, define some useful figures of merit, and provide specific selection suggestions.

A common design technique for power distribution networks (PDN) is the determination of the peak distribution bus impedance that will assure that the voltage excursions on the power rail will be maintained within allowable limits, generally referred to as the target impedance. In theory, the allowable target impedance is determined by dividing the tolerable voltage excursion by the maximum change in load current.