In 2024, our experts were dedicated to breaking down engineering fundamentals and exploring the latest industry trends and challenges. We hope you’ve found our insights and guidance helpful throughout the year, and we’re grateful for your continued trust and readership. 

As we look back on the past year, we’re excited to highlight five of our most popular blog posts, just in case you missed them. 

Electronic warfare (EW) systems are an increasingly critical component of modern warfare. They seek to control and exploit the electromagnetic spectrum to gain an advantage over adversaries while preventing them from reciprocating. This includes detecting and denying the use of radar systems and GPS. There are three main sectors within electronic warfare. Electronic attack (EA) focuses on acts designed to disrupt, degrade, destroy or deceive. Electronic protection (EP) seeks to diminish the effectiveness of adversarial EA systems. Electronic support (ES) extracts signal information for intelligence purposes.

Energy storage capacitor banks supply pulsed power in all manner of high-current applications, including shockless compression and fusion. As the technology behind capacitor banks advances with more precise switching and higher energy density, fast discharge capacitors can reliably support more advanced applications.  

As a manufacturer of custom ceramics for thin-film circuit development for more than four decades, we are highly familiar with all the complexities involved in working with these materials to build a variety of circuits. Over the years, we’ve received quite a few questions about this technology, so we put together this Q&A to help answer some of the common questions you may have about thin film circuits. 

Product designers working on critical applications requiring electrical power must carefully select components that not only supply the appropriate amount of voltage at the right time, but also help mitigate issues such as voltage ripple, ensure system longevity, and improve component reliability. 

In complex radio frequency (RF) applications, “wideband” has varying definitions depending on both the application of interest and the portion of the RF circuit you’re focused on. Wideband can be used to describe the entire spectrum shown in Figure 1 or large portions of it.   

In a short period of time, artificial intelligence (AI) large language models (LLMs) like ChatGTP and Claude have made leaps and bounds in terms of their size and sophistication. Size, as measured by the number of parameters, has increased by a factor of one thousand in merely five years, and it’s not projected to stop (Figure 1). This rapid growth raises numerous questions about the future of AI, while also presenting immediate challenges, with power consumption being a significant concern.  

Companies across the world are engaged in fusion research; some are large national and international labs while others are start-ups looking for lower-cost alternatives to traditional fusion techniques. Their work is built on the premise that fused light nuclei have a net positive energy yield because their combined mass is less than the sum of their individual masses before fusion. Think Albert Einstein’s E = mc². 

Electromagnetic interference degrades electronic performance and causes unintended outcomes like signal distortion, data corruption and system malfunctions. To minimize interference, Knowles Precision Devices has expanded EMI filter offerings to include hermetically sealed EMI filters that attenuate unwanted EMI signals while allowing desired signals to pass. SFSW series filters were designed to preserve signal integrity and ensure reliable operation in high-reliability applications with strict electromagnetic compatibility standards.

Here's what you can expect from our SFSW series:

Considering the complexities of routing and signal integrity, it’s more and more common to see multilayer printed circuit board (PCB) designs where radio frequencies (RF) or digital traces cross on different layers of the stack. However, depending on the number of crossovers needed, the cost and complexity of this solution can outweigh the potential design benefits. For example, at high frequencies, multilayer designs are uniquely expensive to build; when laying out a ‘tile’ phased array, there’s very little space for components because of the λ/2 pitch of the array.