As aerospace and defense technology advances, manufacturers need to find ways to incorporate more features without simply making planes larger, heavier, and increasingly more expensive. This is why the size, weight, power, and cost (SWaP-C) is often a driving factor for aerospace and defense companies when awarding contracts to component manufacturers.

Welcome to the Capacitor Fundamentals Series, where we teach you about the ins and outs of chips capacitors – their properties, product classifications, test standards, and use cases – in order to help you make informed decisions about the right capacitors for your specific applications. After describing high reliability testing in our previous article, let’s discuss visual standards for chip capacitors.

In mission-critical applications, additional screening and testing is required to ensure that only the most robust parts make it to the finished product. Preventative measures, like high quality standards, lessen the possibility of failure in the field and minimize the likelihood of astronomical downstream costs.

Supply noise creates challenges in RF systems where it can mix with RF signals, impacting signal-to-noise ratios and potentially causing spurious output. Thus, high-frequency monolithic microwave integrated circuit (MMIC) amplifiers with broadband gain need to be protected from RF noise on the supply lines. Avoiding these issues with supply line noise requires RF designers to use a bypass capacitor that provides an efficient path to ground for RF energy on the supply line before it enters a gain stage (Figure 1).

We look forward to seeing you in Paris for European Microwave Week 2019. We will be there to discuss our RF and Microwave solutions, including:

Imaging systems account for a significant portion of the medical devices and electronics industry. There is an expanding range of imaging modalities, and one of the most common is magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). MRI equipment uses a strong magnetic field and computer-generated radio waves to create cross sectional images of the body; these images enable health care professionals to investigate and diagnose without the need for an invasive procedure.

RF Filters are an integral part of radio systems, required for keeping the right signals ‘in’ and the wrong signals ‘out’ on both the Transmit and Receive sides of the system.

As mobile wireless technology moves from LTE to 5G, a common question we hear is “How is filtering going to be handled in the unfamiliar territory of millimeter wavelengths?” There is a lot of uncertainty around what filters will be required, where they need to be placed in the base station, how good they need to be, and so forth.

Innovating essential high technology systems with demanding specifications is always challenging; making any sort of difference requires extensive resources and deep subject matter knowledge.

But that’s what keeps it interesting.

The advent of fifth generation (5G) communications brings an increased interest in Millimeter Wave (mmWave) technologies. One of the biggest technology challenges engineers face with 5G is how to implement sufficiently high-performance RF filtering in mmWave applications. Given the frequencies involved a distributed element planar approach, such as using Microstrip or Stripline, is often ideal for constructing resonators and filters.