With the challenges of today’s global supply chain, we understand that improving the efficiency of your development process is critical to delivering quality products on time. When evaluating components for use in your product, you don’t have time to wait 2–3 weeks for a product sample. And you certainly don’t have the time to wait another 2–3 weeks if you discover that the sample you ordered isn’t right for your design. That’s why Knowles Precision Devices is now offering all-in-one Single Layer Capacitor (SLC) Design Kits for design engineers.

To help customers with filter selection, we generally provide a lot of information on what our filters can do. But in this new Filter Basics Series, we are taking a step back to cover some background information on how filters do what they do. Regardless of the technology behind the filter, there are several key concepts that all filters share that we will dive into throughout this series. By providing this detailed fundamental filter information, we hope to help you simplify your future filtering decisions. 

In part 8 of this series, we dive deeper into bandwidth by looking at the history of bandwidth, how bandwidth dictates data rate, and why the type of filter required will vary depending on an application’s bandwidth requirements.

When launching expensive mission-critical equipment and people into space, there is absolutely no room for failure of any component. Therefore, if you are an RF system designer working on an aerospace application, you must be sure you are selecting high-quality, high-reliability electronic components for all your designs. But do you have a process in place for this type of component selection? At Knowles Precision Devices, we know it can be a challenging to navigate component selection for aerospace applications as there are many combinations of standards and tests that can be performed to space-qualify parts.

In a previous 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.

To help customers with filter selection, we generally provide a lot of information on what our filters can do. But in this new Filter Basics Series, we are taking a step back to cover some background information on how filters do what they do. Regardless of the technology behind the filter, there are several key concepts that all filters share that we will dive into throughout this series. By providing this detailed fundamental filter information, we hope to help you simplify your future filtering decisions. 

In this new application note, we dive into the details on all things related to tuning elements. If you are unfamiliar with tuning elements, our line of Johanson Microwave Tuning Elements are specially designed for tuning microwave circuits such as filters, oscillators, delay lines, multiplexers, and dielectric resonant structures. Prior to the introduction of this line of Johanson Microwave Tuning Elements, microwave circuit designers were burdened with the frustrating task of selecting from a makeshift conglomeration of "hardware store" nuts and bolts to tune precision microwave circuitry.

To help customers with filter selection, we generally provide a lot of information on what our filters can do. But in this new Filter Basics Series, we are taking a step back to cover some background information on how filters do what they do. Regardless of the technology behind the filter, there are several key concepts that all filters share that we will dive into throughout this series. By providing this detailed fundamental filter information, we hope to help you simplify your future filtering decisions. 

Part 6 expands on part 5 by covering more details on waveguides and transmission lines, including the different types of electromagnetic modes supported by each.

When selecting a filter implementation, one factor that is common across all frequencies is optimizing the size of the filter given the application and the required performance. At mmWave frequencies this can be prove to be a particularly interesting problem, given the change in the physical dimensions of the system as one moves from say 600MHz to 38GHz. 

Since a lot of electronic component manufacturers are now focusing production efforts on high-volume commodity applications, as their specialty component production equipment ages, many companies are electing to divest in this type of production. One component that we’ve seen fall into this category in recent years is the surface-mount electromagnetic interference (EMI) filter. These three-terminal chips use conventional multilayer ceramic capacitor (MLCC) manufacturing techniques to form a filter that has a short circuit end-to-end and has a capacitance between the end terminals and the side (ground) terminals. 

To help customers with filter selection, we generally provide a lot of information on what our filters can do. But in this new Filter Basics Series, we are taking a step back to cover some background information on how filters do what they do. Regardless of the technology behind the filter, there are several key concepts that all filters share that we will dive into throughout this series. By providing this detailed fundamental filter information, we hope to help you simplify your future filtering decisions.

Part 5 dives into more detail on lumped element and distributed element filter construction techniques and when each option is most appropriate to use based on your application.