The Leyden jar, invented by the Dutch physicist Pieter van Musschenbroek in 1746, preceded what we today call the battery. Originally, “battery” denoted several units connected in series or parallel. Thus, there could be a battery of Leyden jars. Actually, the Leyden jar works on a principle completely different from that of a battery. It […]
X-rays and X-ray instrumentation Basics
X-rays occupy a band within the electromagnetic spectrum higher in frequency (between 0.10 and 10 nm wavelength) than ultraviolet radiation and lower in frequency than gamma rays (less than 10 pm wavelength). At such a high frequency, the amount of energy they carry is awesome. They pass with minimal loss through most substances and their […]
What you need to know about information theory
A lot of the testing and verification activities of EEs today centers on concepts having a theoretical basis in Claude Shannon’s (of Nyquist-Shannon renown) article titled, A Mathematical Theory of Communication, which appeared in 1948 in the Bell System Technical Journal. Shannon’s full treatise gets to be quite mathematical. Fortunately, some of the fundamental concepts […]
Signal Integrity and high-speed design challenges: interview with Mentor’s Todd Westerhoff
At DesignCon 2019, I met with Todd Westerhoff, HyperLynx high-speed design analysis product manager at Mentor, a Siemens Business. Todd has over 38 years of experience in systems modeling, simulation and signal integrity. Prior to joining Mentor, Todd held senior technical and management roles at SiSoft, Cisco and Cadence. We spent time talking about current […]
Understanding total harmonic distortion measurements
Most electronics engineers and technicians have a good understanding of total harmonic distortion (THD). But there are a few elusive details that come into play during THD measurements. THD is the ratio of the sum of the powers of all harmonic components to the power of the fundamental frequency. Properly speaking, the fundamental frequency is […]
How AC Power Sources Get Synchronized
Today’s huge ac grids consist of many separate generators with new ones continually coming online. When a generator is powered down for maintenance or even temporarily disconnected, it must resynchronize upon rejoining the grid, generally by automatic means with manual backup instrumentation in place if needed. The process of synchronizing ac power sources to grid […]
User review: Connecting the Tektronix AFG 31000 AWG to the MDO3000 oscilloscope
The new Tektronix AFG 31000 Arbitrary Function Generator is noteworthy in that the Home screen, accessed by pressing the Home button on the front panel, permits the user to choose a Basic or Advanced mode. The Basic mode resembles a traditional AFG, with a library of internal waveforms and menus that permit the user to […]
Basics of signal jamming
Discussions of signal jamming were once largely confined to electronic warfare forums. But with the rise of autonomous vehicle technology, jamming has become a mainstream topic. It now pays to know a few basics about both the test setups necessary to gauge resistance to jamming techniques and the principles of signal propagation. Many of the […]
Measuring Ethernet and WiFi transmissions
The Ethernet computer networking protocol is used in local area networks, metropolitan area networks and wide area networks. While the term is often used to distinguish wired data transmissions from Wi-Fi, both use parallel protocol details, notably 48-bit MAC address and Ethernet frame format. Actually, Wi-Fi is Ethernet over a different medium. There are a […]
The difference between spontaneous emissions and stimulated emissions
The terms spontaneous emission and stimulated emission sometimes get confused. The term thermal emission sometimes gets thrown into the mix as well. Here are the basic definitions to help sort things out and the procedures for measuring these parameters. When we speak of spontaneous or stimulated emissions we are referring to atoms whose electrons are […]
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