AVX Glass capacitors played a vital role in the wake up circuitry and deployment of the Huygens space probe. Glass capacitors facilitated the separation of the probe from the Cassini spacecraft on December 25, 2004, and allowed the probe to begin a 21-day trip to the surface of Titan, Saturn’s large...

The proliferation of inertial MEMS sensor content in cars is driving system designers to rethink the current stand-alone sensor architecture in favor of an inertial sensing cluster. Once the inertial information for all systems is available, added features will add little cost to the vehicle. While ...

For many years there has been a vision of creating a universal engineering tool for developing, debugging and testing software. Today, we are one step closer to having such a tool that can also be used in the world of embedded systems development. LabVIEW’s use of graphical programming as a basis fo...

Systems applications such as telecommunications and data communications that employ fault tolerant power delivery architectures usually require "live (or hot) swap" capability for zero downtime. This article presents design considerations related to 48V distributed power architectures using hot swa...

The LTC3770 is considered a successor to the LTC1778 step-down controller, which was introduced a few years ago. There are a number of differences between the two ICs, including faster transient response and the addition of on-chip margining and tracking in the LTC3770. In addition, this new chip ...

Linear chargers are widely used for single-cell rechargeable Li-ion batteries in handheld applications due to their simplicity, low cost, and small physical size. Despite all of the advantages the linear charging topology has, it does have its Achilles heel – high thermal dissipation.