If you’re attending the 2022 International Microwave Symposium (IMS) June 19 – 24 at the Colorado Convention Center in Denver, you won’t want to miss the exciting information the team at Knowles Precision Devices has to share!

If you’re a long-time reader of our blog, you know that we typically dedicate our blog content to sharing our engineering team’s in-depth expertise and insights on the trends and technologies impacting the industries and applications we serve. We tend to be so focused on the exciting things we are working on to drive innovation in capacitor and RF filtering applications that we don’t share much about how we got to where we are now. But, as you can imagine, getting to the point we are at now with our world-class engineering and manufacturing teams, did not happen by accident.

In recent years, multilayer ceramic capacitors (MLCCs) have emerged as an excellent capacitor option for the high-power electrical systems needed in electric vehicle (EVs) due to their small physical size, low inductance, and ability to operate at higher temperatures. However, EV engineers are facing two big challenges with using MLCCs including DC bias that can cause capacitance loses of 80 to 90 percent of their quoted value and self-heating issues from AC ripple that can lead to inefficiencies in circuits as well as increased cooling demands. 

As we reach the end of 2021, we hope you get the chance to relax with friends and family and spend time reflecting on the past year. To help with these reflection efforts, we consolidated our five most impactful blog posts from the past 12 months, including topics such as key aspects of selecting quality trimmer capacitors and electromagnetic interference (EMI) prevention methods in electric vehicles (EVs). We hope these insights can help set you up for success in 2022!

This year, Knowles Precision Devices acquired Integrated Microwave Corporation (IMC), a leader in the design and manufacture of custom precision RF microwave filters and multiplexers for the aerospace, defense, and communications industries. This acquisition was particularly exciting as our two companies share deep expertise in engineering high-performance ceramics for RF and microwave applications. And, like Knowles Precision Devices, IMC also has a long heritage of supplying highly reliable components for mission critical space devices that includes applications such as the MARS Orbiters, MARS Landers, and MARS Rovers.

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, Knowles Precision Devices has stayed focused on our primary goal of helping our customers address their most challenging application needs by providing high-performance components and innovative solutions. While 2021 did offer some unique challenges, overall, it was an exceptional year for our business. This is because even though all the unprecedented circumstances we saw in 2020, we were able to quickly adapt our business, making us really well positioned heading into 2021. As a result, this year was one of our best growth years to date.

Join us and Charged EVs on Wednesday, November 17 at 10 am EDT for our latest live webinar – Addressing MLCC Performance Issues in High-Voltage EV Applications.

If you’re struggling with the challenges of ensuring high-reliability with your medical device electronics, you won’t want to miss our upcoming webinar sponsored by GlobalSpec, Using High-Reliability MLCCs for Medical Implantable Applications, on Thursday, November 4 at 11:00 am EDT.

We are pleased to announce that the Knowles Corporation recently acquired Integrated Microwave Corporation (IMC), a leader in the design and manufacture of custom precision RF microwave filters and multiplexers for the aerospace, defense, and communications industries. With this acquisition, the Knowles Precision Devices Microwave group can now offer a complete range of RF and microwave filtering solutions that support applications from the VHF to the Ka band. In addition to the small, temperature-stable filters our customers have come to know us for, we can now deliver ceramic and cavity filters for lower frequency and/or higher power applications. The full range of the IMC filter technologies we now offer is shown in the graphic below.

During the first-ever virtual Menlo Micro Switch Summit, Knowles Precision Devices joined John Richardson, founder and president of X-Microwave, and Tom Clickenbeard, applications engineer at Menlo Microsystems, to give a presentation on Prototyping Using X-Microwave’s XM-Blocks with Knowles Precision Devices RF Filters and MEMS Switches.