Articles by Eric Bogatin

The dielectric constant, Dk, of a laminate will affect the characteristic impedance of a transmission line and its time delay. If you hope to achieve a specific target characteristic impedance on the first pass, it is essential to know the Dk of each laminate layer.  Here is a quick, simple way of measuring it.

Do students really understand transmission lines? Do YOU really understand transmission lines? Here is a problem I may give my students, if I am feeling particularly cruel

Here’s the dilemma every hardware engineer faces at one time or another. Your new circuit board just came back from the assembly shop, you turn it on, and it doesn’t work. You have to debug it to find the root cause of the bug(s). How are you going to do this? Turns out, there’s an app for that. Eric Bogatin explains.

 “A few minutes upfront checking will save you hours of frustration later,” Eric Bogatin explains seven features of s-parameters

Many designs today include three different value decoupling capacitors, or when using just one capacitor, a small value like 0.1 uF. These recommendations are based on 50-year-old assumptions that do not apply today. It is time to reconsider these out of date, legacy design guidelines.

Copper loss is one ingredient in interconnect loss. Surface texture or roughness has long been recognized as adding an excess loss over smooth copper. With the SI-VSP (very smooth profile) copper foils recently introduced by Mitsui Mining&Smelting Co. Ltd. (Mitsui Kinzoku), we may have reached the limits.

Over the years, I have presented to and worked with thousands of engineers, from very young to very old. Many of the problems they bring to me have a small set of common answers. I’ve collected these into 20 basic rules of engineering.

“There are two kinds of engineer, those who are building antennas on purpose and those who are not doing it on purpose.” Every oscilloscope ships with at least two 10x probes. They are ubiquitous in every lab. But they have a significant problem above 10 MHz, unless care is taken. In some cases, we can turn this problem into a feature.