Articles by Eric Bogatin

With more than three times more webinars offered in our Covid-19 era, we have more opportunities to accelerate up the learning curve or waste a lot of time. I sacrificed hours of my time watching dozens of webinars to identify these three princes. Check them out. They are well worth your time.

Probing signals with a bandwidth below 100 MHz and voltage sensitivity above 100 mV is a no-brainer. Regardless of the type of signal or the source impedance, the venerable 10x passive probe is the answer. However, at bandwidths >100 MHz and with voltage sensitivity <100 mV, the 10x passive probe may not be the best option. In this article, SIJ technical editor Eric Bogatin introduces an easy-to-implement, low-cost alternative to the 10x passive probe specifically for power-rail measurements.

SIJ technical editor, Eric Bogatin, shares his picks for great watches or reads for this month.

This simple measurement demonstrates the most important principle in SI/PI and EMI: that the return current will flow in the path of lowest resistance below about 10 kHz. But above about 10 kHz, the return current will begin to redistribute in the return path to be adjacent to the signal conductor. Read on to learn more.

The principles underlying SI, PI, and EMC are not magic, and they are not about mysterious energy flows in the space between conductors. They are firmly rooted in the fundamental properties of electromagnetic fields, with a 160 year long rich history. Embrace it!

The Ig Noble Prizes are awarded every year for an individual or group who “did something that makes people laugh and then think.” In our time of increased stress what a perfect combination of activities for engineers to participate and experience: laughing and thinking.

SIJ technical editor, Eric Bogatin, has spent many hours lately watching online training and webinars. He’s launching a regular column to share the ones he thinks are particularly worth watching. Here are his first two picks.

When you need a specialized expert or an assistant for overflow engineering design or analysis work, it’s always a challenge finding a qualified consultant. I get asked for a recommendation for a consultant at least once a week. I tell them to check out the List of SI PI and EMI Consultants on the SI Journal web site, recently updated.

The attenuation in a uniform differential pair has two root causes: conductor loss and dielectric loss. By understanding how design decisions affect these two fundamental root causes, we can develop a few simple guiding principles which point us in the right directions to reduce the attenuation of a channel. These are the directions to follow when loss is important. In some cases, increasing the differential impedance will decrease loss, and in some cases it will increase the loss. Read on to see why.

The first goal in any high-speed board stack up design is to engineer interconnects with a target impedance, and the first step in this process is to use a 2D field solver to explore design space with a virtual prototype. Just how well can a field solver predict the impedance of traces on a real board? This article aims to answer this question.