More than 3 million people in the United States alone rely on a pacemaker to regulate their heart rhythm. While the battery may be the most recognizable component in the system, capacitors are just as essential to ensure these implantable devices function safely and reliably over time. 

Operating in high humidity settings exposes electronic components to severe degradation risks. Moisture leads to corrosion, insulation breakdown and reduced lifespan over time. Expertly engineered components enable reliable performance under these harsh conditions.

In high-voltage, high-reliability applications, safety is non-negotiable, which is why safety capacitors are essential. These passive components are engineered to mitigate the risks associated with transient voltages and electrical interference, helping protect both users and equipment from hazards, even in the event of component failure.

Many applications today increasingly demand miniaturized surface-mount components that can perform reliably at ever-increasing working and testing voltages. As a result, Knowles recently released a new range of X1/Y2 safety-certified surface-mount multilayer ceramic capacitors (MLCCs). 

Powering everything from pulsed lasers to experimental fusion reactors, pulsed power systems demand fast, controlled energy delivery. High-performance capacitors are key to this capability. 

Alongside capacitors, inductors are essential components in RF and microwave applications. Ceramic core inductors provide stable inductance values, ensuring consistent performance across a broad frequency range. These qualities make them ideal for applications where low loss and high efficiency at high frequency are critical.

Whether used in signal filtering, impedance matching or energy storage, ceramic core inductors play a vital role in optimizing circuit performance. As demand for high-performance RF components grows, Knowles is offering high-Q ceramic core inductors for superior efficiency and reliability, making them well-suited for standard and high reliability applications.

In an AC/DC converter, power factor correction (PFC) circuits are required to ensure the input current is in phase with and proportional to the input voltage, improving power quality and efficiency. But the high-frequency switching that occurs in the PFC circuit can generate significant electromagnetic interference (EMI). To prevent this noise from disrupting nearby electronics or violating regulatory limits, EMI filters are essential. This blog post provides a comprehensive guide for selecting the appropriate safety capacitors to perform EMI filtering in the PFC stage of an AC/DC converter.

Electronic devices power our world and allow us to communicate. In all applications requiring signal integrity and accurate power amplification, blocking capacitors are used to provide clean waveforms and correctly amplified voltages.

From EVs and industrial automation to renewable energy and smart logistics, power systems are becoming increasingly complex. As a result, they’re increasingly dependent on reliable, high-speed energy storage too. Enter supercapacitors, a critical technology bridging the gap between traditional batteries and real-time power demands.  

As engineers embed receivers for Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS), like GPS and Galileo, into systems ranging from autonomous vehicles to precision agriculture, the RF environment is becoming more crowded, and it’s more difficult to maintain signal integrity.