Technical articles, selection guides and industry insights about electronic components, sourcing and PCB design.
A lithium-ion battery stores roughly 250 Wh/kg and, if charged incorrectly, releases that energy as fire. Selecting the right charger IC, configuring…
Pick the wrong wireless protocol and your battery-powered sensor dies in a week instead of lasting two years, or your data throughput collapses to ki…
A human-body ESD discharge delivers 2-15 kV in nanoseconds, with peak currents reaching 30 A for a level-4 contact discharge per IEC 61000-4-2. Witho…
Every watt of power dissipated in a semiconductor must leave the die, cross the package, pass through a thermal interface material and exit through a…
Every PCB with more than one voltage rail faces this decision: generate the lower rail with a switching regulator (buck converter) or an LDO (low-dro…
A relay is conceptually simple: a coil pulls a contact, load turns on. Pick the wrong type and you replace it every three months, weld the contacts o…
A fuse is the cheapest insurance policy on a PCB. A 20-cent glass cartridge fuse that opens correctly saves a 200-euro power supply, a 50-euro microc…
The op-amp market spans from a 30-cent LM358 to a 15-euro precision zero-drift amplifier. The difference is not just the price tag. It is input offse…
You have a temperature sensor, an EEPROM and an accelerometer to connect to your microcontroller. Do you wire them all to one I2C bus or give each it…
Every microcontroller needs a clock. Get the crystal wrong and your UART drops bits at temperature extremes, or the oscillator fails to start at all …