TP-Link MC220L: Media conversion keeps the network well

Got lightning? A bidirectional RJ45/SFP intermediary can, by “taking one for the team”, keep it from propagating through the remainder of your network. Back in November 2024, I detailed my initial attempts (with underwhelming results) to…

Surface resistance and resistivity testers for ESD applications

Surface resistance and resistivity testers are essential tools for evaluating materials used in electrostatic discharge (ESD) control. By quantifying how surfaces resist or conduct electrical charge, they enable engineers to verify compliance…

Surface mount and microwaves

Upside-down mounting can deliver inductance upsides for surface mount passives and other components. Please visualize the structure of a surface mount resistor as shown in the following Figure 1: Figure 1 Surface mount resistor constituents…

Bring-up and testing of systems with CXL Type 3 memory expanders

This series of articles is written for system bring-up engineers, post-silicon validation engineers, platform firmware developers, kernel and driver integrators, and test architects who are—or will soon be—working with Compute Express Link…

Memory card interfaces keep pace with the internal bus evolution race: Part 2

Learning from and adapting the lessons of the past is wise, as long as it’s not taken to overly constraining excess. So, too, is adopting others’ ideas (in a non-patent-infringing way, of course). As you already know if you read last week’s…

Carbon nanotube coating creates on-chip terahertz waveguides

There’s considerable interest in leveraging the bandwidth and other potential virtues of terahertz waves that occupy the spectrum between the conventional RF and optical worlds, generally considered to span 100 GHz (3 mm wavelength) to 10…

SoC FPGA advances wideband RF processing

Altera is now sampling its Agilex 9 Direct RF AGRW039 wideband SoC FPGA for aerospace, defense, and communication systems. According to Altera, the device delivers a 40% increase in compute capability per square millimeter. It also provides…

TO-247 SiC package boosts high-voltage isolation

Navitas has developed a TO-247 package offering more than 6000 V of isolation for its 1200-V, 2300-V, and 3300-V SiC MOSFETs. Designated the UHV-TO-247-4-ISO, the through-hole package supports direct-cooled thermal management through a reflow-compatible…

Vertical power platform cuts AI thermal bottlenecks

Lotus Microsystems’ vStrata vertical power delivery platform targets the electrical, thermal, and mechanical challenges of AI infrastructure. The first module in the vStrata Power Series, the LS0580, is a fully integrated power-system-in-package…

Hall switch streamlines automotive position sensing

The Melexis MLX92344 is a 2-wire, 2-bit Hall-effect switch for contactless detection of up to four positions in automotive body electronics. Unlike conventional microswitch-based approaches that often require multiple mechanical switches to…

NVIDIA chip powers local AI workloads

NVIDIA has unveiled the RTX Spark, a “superchip” delivering up to 1 petaflop of AI compute to enable Windows PCs to run personal AI agents. The device combines 128 GB of unified memory with an NVIDIA Blackwell RTX GPU featuring 6,144 CUDA…

How fleet learning works under bounded gate authority

The first article in this silicon governance series established a fundamental reality: observability is not automatically governed evidence. Advanced AI silicon platforms generate a massive stream of runtime telemetry, including network-on-chip…