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Microstrip patch antennas are among the most widely used antennas in wireless, radar, navigation, sensing, and automotive electronics. Their appeal is straightforward: they are low-profile, lightweight, inexpensive to manufacture, and easy to integrate with printed circuit boards or dielectric carriers. Their limitations are equally important: relatively narrow bandwidth, moderate gain, sensitivity to substrate properties, and performance that can change significantly with th

Phase margin is one of those engineering terms that can sound abstract until you connect it to something familiar: an amplifier that rings when you touch its output, a voltage regulator that oscillates after you change its capacitor, or a motor-control loop that overshoots whenever it changes speed. In each case, the underlying problem is similar. A feedback loop is trying to correct an error, but the correction arrives late. If the delayed correction is large enough, the loo

A photodiode converts optical power into electrical current. That current may be only a few picoamperes in a precision measurement system or several milliamperes in a short-range optical receiver. In either case, the first active circuit connected to the detector often determines the system’s sensitivity, bandwidth, dynamic range, and noise performance. The standard interface is the transimpedance amplifier, or TIA. A TIA converts photodiode current into a voltage while prese

Electromigration is often discussed as though it were a single failure mechanism. In printed circuit boards, however, several electrically assisted transport mechanisms can produce similar symptoms: rising leakage, intermittent shorts, unexpected resets, and ultimately open or short circuits. A robust design approach begins by separating them. Classical electromigration is movement of metal atoms driven by electrical current density, often associated with high-current interco

Find the Problem and Designing It Out! Noise is one of the most persistent problems in analog circuit design because it is present even when the circuit is working exactly as intended. A sensor may produce a small, meaningful signal, while every resistor, transistor, amplifier, power rail, cable, and circuit board trace contributes unwanted electrical variation around it. If the desired signal is large, that variation may be harmless. If the signal is small, the same noise ca

Why the next mobile network may include the sky For most of the mobile era, a phone has connected to a tower, and the tower has connected to the wider network. That model works extremely well where population density justifies the cost of building terrestrial infrastructure. It works less well in deserts, oceans, mountain ranges, forests, disaster zones, and rural areas where a tower may be too expensive, too vulnerable, or simply impossible to reach. Direct-to-satellite comm