Engineering articles about choosing resistors, capacitors, inductors, semiconductors, and other electronic components.
12 available articles
Avoid common PCB power and trace design mistakes including undersized traces, voltage drop, via bottlenecks, RMS-current errors, thermal issues, poor copper pours, and high-current layout problems.
Avoid common power design mistakes involving watts versus watt-hours, unit prefixes, RMS current, power factor, efficiency, derating, thermal design, startup current, voltage drop, and undersized components.
Avoid common MOSFET design mistakes including using VGS(th) as turn-on voltage, weak gate drive, gate charge, RDS(on) heating, switching loss, SOA, body diode behavior, transients, and PCB layout.
Avoid common BJT circuit design mistakes including incorrect base resistors, insufficient base drive, hFE assumptions, saturation errors, thermal problems, bias instability, and pinout mistakes.
Avoid common LED design mistakes including missing current control, incorrect resistor values, excessive current, forward-voltage assumptions, resistor power errors, thermal problems, brightness comparison errors, and improper LED driving.
Avoid resistor selection errors involving power rating, tolerance, temperature coefficient, package, voltage rating, noise, and long-term stability.
Learn how to choose the right resistor E-Series by balancing tolerance, precision, cost, availability, and circuit requirements.
Learn the most common capacitor selection mistakes involving dielectric type, voltage derating, ESR, temperature, polarity, and capacitance stability.
Compare ceramic and electrolytic capacitors, understand their strengths, weaknesses, ESR, voltage behavior, lifetime, and learn how to select the right capacitor for real engineering designs.
Avoid common inductor selection mistakes involving inductance, saturation current, DCR, core material, SRF, rated current, package, EMI, price, and datasheet review.
Compare ferrite and powdered iron inductor cores by frequency response, saturation behavior, core loss, DC bias, EMI behavior, cost, and practical applications.
Avoid the most common diode selection mistakes involving diode type, reverse voltage, forward current, forward voltage, reverse recovery, package, thermal design, datasheets, and design margin.
