Bench Talk

The additional voltage and current introduced to the popular USB standard by USB-PD multiplies hazards and makes circuit protection essential. But designing protection against all threats can be complex and expensive. Integrated solutions from chip makers simplify the task.

High reliability is paramount in our always on, hyper-connected world. Application downtime or failure runs the gamut from frustrating to incredibly expensive. That is why overvoltage protection remains a consistent requirement.

There are several factors that can affect solid-state lighting including stress, packaging-related, and component-related issues. Discover the key threats that affect the reliability of LED lighting systems.

Whether to prevent floating I/O pins on an MCU or to provide an interface between two circuits, pull-up resistors are a necessity. But what size resistor should you use?

Protecting interface connections from overvoltage conditions and transient events is more important than ever with the proliferation of embedded electronics. Bourns clamp and crowbar protection is effective at protecting circuit interfaces in silicon and ceramic electronic components.

Engineers today are asked to design applications with increasing power densities, which directly correspond to the demand for resistors. Leading manufacturers of these mighty passive components are answering current application requirements with new power resistor designs that can tolerate higher amounts of power in small and smaller form factors.

High sulfur environments play havoc with everything from IT industry server farms and data/storage centers and telecommunication base stations to industrial control equipment and rubber, paper, and oil manufacturing plants. In standard film resistors, their internal silver (Ag) or silver palladium (AgPd) terminal is only protected by the epoxy passivation layer making the device very susceptible to sulfur-based gases. Realizing how sulfur gases can affect the reliability of its film resistors, Bourns developed a specialized Palladium (Pd) layer that removes the chance for corrosion and the formation of silver sulfide.

Capacitor datasheets are notorious for omitting performance details, typically only including individual performance parameters in each graph or only including "typical" performance of combined parameters. KEMET’s capacitor parameter simulator, called K-SIM, solves this problem by combining multiple parameters into a single graph.

USB ports supply both data communications and charging power to portable and wearable devices, so it’s become more and more critical to protect ports against abuse. Fortunately, there are design techniques that reduce power surge risks to USB ports.

Any heat sink must undergo an evaluation to consider both the directional flow of the heat it expels (if a temperature differential is sufficient) and other sources that may be using the same cooling zone to expel excess heat. Let’s examine the reason why.