With production of high-performance electric vehicles (EVs) such as the Porsche Taycan and several manufacturers slated to release EVs with 800 V battery systems in 2021, using high-voltage battery systems in EVs is no longer just theoretical. Since vehicles operating at higher voltages can address consumer’s main concerns with EVs, this is a welcome advancement, especially as some countries are announcing regulations to eventually allow only EV sales. These changes include accelerating charging time by increasing power and reducing the weight of vehicles which, among other improvements, helps increase driving range and reduce consumer range anxiety.

Looking back, 2020 was a year full of big changes regarding how RF spectrum is allocated in the US. Led by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), multiple portions of the spectrum ranging from the C band to the V band were either opened to new uses and/or auctioned to new users throughout the year. These changes are driving a variety of new opportunities for wireless device manufacturers and broadband and cellular carriers, which is resulting in a range of exciting new challenges for RF technology vendors to help solve. 

To provide a better understanding of build-to-print in general and the breadth of our offerings, as well as how our thin-film technology can benefit your applications, we’ve put together a Build-to-Print Basics series. Part 7 covers how we use in-house laser machining, laser trimming, and other laser cutting techniques to build high-precision thin-film components.

One of the things all technical disciplines excel at is creating terminology that can trip up those who are not accustomed to speaking the language every day. Take the title of this article for example. These three words sound similar and are definitely inter-related, but they are not inter-changeable.

Mark your calendars for Wednesday, January 13, 2021 at 11 am EST for this Knowles Precision Devices and Charged EVs live Webinar discussing how to address the challenges associated with selecting safe and reliable components for high-voltage EVs.

While 2020 has presented its fair share of challenges, it has also given us a chance to innovate on how we can help customers address some of the biggest issues they face – from addressing bandwidth and quality constraints to delivering new filtering and capacitor technologies. So, as the year comes to an end, we hope you have a little time to relax and re-read some of your favorite blog posts or maybe catch-up on some of the best content you may have missed. We hope these posts will bring you some holiday cheer, or at least provide some ideas and insights to use for a successful 2021.

As an RF engineer, whether you are building a 5G antenna to mount on top of a street light or a satellite that will be launched into space, you are likely being asked to reduce three key factors – size, weight, and power (SWaP). The need to reduce SWaP is becoming increasingly common, but also increasingly tricky, because even though wavelength and the corresponding critical dimensions decrease as frequency goes up, RF circuits generally scale in size and complexity with the wavelengths supported. Thus, it can be really difficult to find companies who are up for the challenge of providing components that are designed to help reduce SWaP

To provide a better understanding of build-to-print in general and the breadth of our offerings, as well as how our thin-film technology can benefit your applications, we’ve put together a Build-to-Print Basics series. Part 6 covers the various aspects of metallization that we consider to determine the best fit for our customer’s build-to-print applications.

In our last article about electric vehicles (EV), we talked about using DC link capacitors as an intermediary buffer in power converters. Today’s topic covers another useful power module component – the snubber capacitor. Snubbers are energy-absorbing circuits used to protect electronics from voltage spikes and transients caused by turning a switch from the On to Off state. Opening a switch intrinsically induces a high voltage across the device, and the snubber provides an alternate flow path for the excess energy to be absorbed by the snubber capacitor and dissipated by a resister or other load.

When designing an RF or microwave application, you will always need some level of filtering to attenuate or remove unwanted signals from the desired channel. Since the end goal of what a filter must accomplish is quite broad, it may seem daunting to know what qualities to look for in a filter to get there.