Articles on circuits, current & code
Field notes, teardowns, and deep-dive engineering writing from our team — covering embedded systems, power electronics, signal integrity, and the software that ties them together.
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Every article is tagged with the engineering domain it serves. Use the filters below to narrow the feed, or search for a specific term, part number, or technique.
Decoding IEEE 802.3bt: delivering 90 W over a single twisted pair without cooking your magnetics
Type 3 and Type 4 PoE++ push the limits of what Category cable was ever designed to carry. We walk through the handshake, the signature, the autonegotiation — and the four failure modes we keep seeing in the lab.
Read the deep-diveWhat really happens during an RTOS context switch
A line-by-line trace through the PendSV handler, with measurements of stack overhead, interrupt latency, and where most engineers lose cycles.
LDO vs. DC-DC: when the quietest rail isn't the lowest-noise one
Spectral measurements from six regulators on the same board, same load step. The results surprised us — and changed how we spec downstream filters.
Why your 50 Ω microstrip isn't really 50 Ω (and what to do about it)
Field-solver vs. calculator vs. measured: a side-by-side on FR-4 stackups with realistic copper roughness, and the field-solver settings that actually matter.
CAN FD, CAN XL, and the curious case of the 11-bit identifier
Why the 29-bit extension won the war the first time around — and why CAN XL designers are betting that history doesn't repeat.
Beyond the switch-statement: hierarchical state machines for real firmware
How to model a multi-modal sensor node using HSMs, why entry/exit actions are worth the boilerplate, and a tiny preprocessor that makes it readable.
Your 10× probe is loading the circuit more than you think
A look at probe capacitance, ground-spring inductance, and the rise-time tax they impose — with practical tips for picking the right tip for the job.
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Power Electronics
Converters, magnetics, thermal design, and the long tail of compliance.
24 articlesEmbedded Systems
MCUs, RTOS, drivers, and the discipline of writing for a machine you'll never sit at.
31 articlesPCB Design
Stackups, routing, manufacturability, and the things your fab house wishes you'd stop doing.
19 articlesSignal Integrity
Eye diagrams, jitter budgets, crosstalk, and why your "good enough" link failed compliance.
14 articlesFirmware
C, Rust, MISRA, unit tests, and the art of shipping a binary you can actually patch.
22 articlesTest & Measurement
Scopes, logic analyzers, VNA tricks, and the probes behind the measurements.
10 articlesIndustry Notes
Standards updates, supply-chain shifts, and the long-form essays we can't quite file elsewhere.
8 articlesAll topics
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9 topics