A device that converts dc to ac is known as an inverter. Nowadays, most engineers think of solid-state inverters in the context of applications such as electric vehicles and solar panels. Yet even today, not all inverters are solid state. One early form of power inverter was based on mechanical switching and was appropriately called […]
FAQ
Designer’s guide to smart home tech, Part 2
This continues the discussion on smart home technology basics. You can find part 1 here. What is Z-Wave? Behind the Z-Wave standard is the Z-Wave Alliance. It is a wireless protocol that will connect and control smart home and IoT devices today. Today, there are over 3400 certified Z-Wave smart home devices on the market. […]
Liquid cooling for high-performance thermal management
Liquid cooling comes in two forms, cold-plate based systems, and immersion cooling systems. Cold plate liquid cooling is found in various high-performance applications, including energy storage, transportation, electric vehicles, photonics, LEDs, military and industrial power supply cooling, even in some over-clocked desktop computers. The use of immersion cooling is more limited, and it can be […]
Forced air cooling keeps cool with fans and blowers
Natural convection cooling is often inadequate to meet the thermal management needs of electronic systems. In those cases, fans and blowers can move more air and keep the system within a safe operating temperature range. As well as being available in both ac and dc configurations, fans are generally categorized by the way the air […]
Convection cooling components
Convection cooling is used in various devices, from mobile phone handsets to various consumer, communications, and industrial systems where the thermal loading is not too demanding. Devices such as heatsinks, heat spreaders, and heat pipes are used to implement convection cooling. Convection cooling systems are often classified as either passive or active. Active cooling systems […]
Envelope tracking improves power amplifier efficiency
RF power amplifiers consume lots of energy, which is a concern associated with 5G. Envelope tracking helps reduce power consumption but has tradeoffs.
Basic principles of thermal management
Thermal management is a critical element in all types of electronic equipment. There are three general aspects to thermal management; heat transfer, temperature measurements, and managing the coefficients of thermal expansion of the various materials and components used in an electronic assembly. At the most basic level, thermal management involves applying the science of heat […]
What are the AMBA protocols?
As electronic miniaturization has been an all-time goal of chip manufacturers, motherboard-based computer/electronic systems have been eventually replaced by System-on-Chip (SoC) and Package-on-Package (PoP) ICs. Complex computer systems are now condensed to smartphones and other handheld devices. These sophisticated electronic devices and gadgets have an SoC at their heart which manages complete computing and control. […]
mmWave antennas and antenna management for 5G
Antennas, antennas, and more antennas are one of the keys to successfully developing 5G new radio (NR) devices employing millimeter wave (mmWave) bandwidths. 5G NR handsets are highly complex devices. They have to handle the new 5G mmWave bands, including 4×4 multiple input and multiple output (MIMO) antennas, 3GPP specified Evolved Universal Terrestrial Radio Access […]
What is the 5G RF/mmWave signal chain?
The 5G RF/mmWave signal chain is expected to be the same as, and different from, the RF signal chain for today’s LTE Advanced devices. 5G consists of two separate frequency bands, FR1 is mostly repurposed LTE bands and FR2 bands are in the mmWave region. As a result, 5G in the FR1 frequencies can use […]
