Whether you’re stopping by the International Microwave Symposium (IMS) in person at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta this week, or preparing to attend virtually from June 20 – 25, you can join the team at Knowles Precision Devices for some exciting information and presentations.

In part 1 of this two-part guide, we talked about the trade-offs you need to make when selecting the type of capacitor that will be the best fit for your application and the basics of trimmer capacitor design including dielectric material options. This second post focuses more on the details of trimmer capacitor specs and how to determine what's right for your application.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics, 2020 was the fifth consecutive year of growth in electric vehicle (EV) sales, and the demand is growing. Based on the first quarter numbers, the Bureau anticipates 2021 sales are on a path to surpass last year’s. 

As you already know, capacitors are essential circuit elements for storing and suppling charge on demand. For inductors and resistors, capacitors act as the building blocks of passive circuits and the supporting components for active circuits. While a wide range of fixed-value capacitors are used in most electrical circuits, it is sometimes preferable, or necessary, to use a component with a variable capacitance range.

Join Knowles Precision Devices and many members of the advanced battery and EV/HEV community from May 18 – 20 at this year’s virtual edition of The Battery Show Europe. Since this year’s show has been designed to virtually recreate the tradeshow experience from the comfort and safety of your own home or office, we will be exhibiting a variety of our advanced battery technology at virtual booth 8-351.

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. In part 12, we tie everything we’ve discussed so far together and provide more specifics about how we use the processes and options detailed throughout this series to create the custom microwave components you need.

Mark your calendars for Thursday, May 13 at 11 AM EDT to join Knowles Precision Devices, Microwave Journal, and RFMW for a live webinar where we will discuss the filtering challenges for digital broadband receivers in electronic warfare applications.

As the RF spectrum becomes more crowded and the number of bandwidth battles grows each year, RF designers are looking for innovative designs that minimize interference while also increasing signal transmission power. Since phased arrays can efficiently maximize gain and signal directivity and minimize interference for both Tx and Rx, adoption of this architecture by RF designers is growing. This means RF designers are also on a quest for phased array filtering options that can help meet the size, weight, and power (SWaP) needs and performance demands required by today’s RF applications. As a result, our engineers have spent a significant amount of time working on an innovative approach that can meet this seemingly impossible combination of requirements.

Spectral efficiency, or bandwidth efficiency, tells us about the channel capacity over a 1Hz bandwidth. It is a measure of the efficiency of a physical layer protocol when it comes to utilizing the spectrum available. To understand how spectral efficiency is calculated, it’s first important to understand the Shannon-Hartley Theorem in the context of 5G mmWave applications (which we discussed in an earlier blog post).

Today, a wide variety of capacitors with a range of features are available, which can make it difficult for circuit designers and electrical engineers to determine the best fit for their application. To add to the confusion, there is somewhat of a misconception today that some capacitors, such as tantalum and Class II MLCCs, are interchangeable. But this is not always the case. Each capacitor type has distinct advantages and disadvantages that are important to understand to ensure you choose the right technology to best meet the needs of your specific application requirements. This post provides a brief overview of these two capacitor types as well as a variety of factors to consider when making your capacitor selection.