There is a reasonable chance you have held silicon carbide in your hand without knowing it, because the same material that makes an abrasive disc also makes a power transistor. The difference between the two is not chemistry but crystal quality: a bonded mass of hard grains and a single crystal grown for electronics are … Read more
A USB port is a hole in the enclosure with four conductors behind it, one of which is a direct connection to a power rail and two of which go straight into a high-speed receiver. That combination makes the connector the single most exposed point on most consumer devices, and it is why the protection … Read more
Read TVS clamping voltage at its stated current and waveform, solve a source-and-clamp example, and account for wiring overshoot at the protected IC.
The component inside a surge protector is a sacrificial one. It conducts almost nothing for years, absorbs the energy of an event when one arrives, and comes back slightly worse than before. That is the whole design, and it explains both why the device works and why it eventually has to be thrown away. More … Read more
A direct lightning strike is rare and usually destroys things whatever you do. The far more common case is a surge induced on the wiring by a nearby strike, and that one arrives in stages — which is exactly what makes it defensible. Protection is not a single device; it is a sequence of places … Read more
The smallest part on a phone circuit board is often a protection diode, a few tenths of a millimetre across, and it exists because the connector next to it is a doorway. Anything a user touches is a place where a static discharge can enter, and the protection part decides whether that discharge ends as … Read more
Protection diodes can clamp a transient, block unwanted current or provide a path for an inductive load when a switch turns off. Those are different jobs. A TVS across a supply does not automatically provide series reverse-polarity isolation, and a relay flyback diode is not a universal surge protector. Start with the event and current … Read more
A high voltage MOSFET must block the voltage at its own terminals, including switching excursions, while meeting the converter’s loss and thermal limits. A large drain–source rating alone cannot establish suitability. The design also depends on gate drive, reverse-current behavior, operating mode and the physical current loops. Reading those conditions together is more useful than … Read more
Both parts are diodes operated in reverse breakdown, both are drawn with the same symbol, and both are described in datasheets using the same three or four parameter names. The difference is what you are asking them to do all day: regulate a voltage continuously, or absorb a rare event and get out of the … Read more
A TVS diode sits on a board doing nothing for years, and then has to absorb an event that lasts a few millionths of a second. Getting it right is a matter of matching two numbers to the threat, and getting it wrong is usually invisible until a batch of products comes back. This article … Read more
There is no way to see the components inside a sealed product without opening it, and opening it is usually the wrong first step. What you can do is learn the pattern: a small number of everyday objects contain almost the whole discrete device catalogue, each in a predictable place. This tour follows ten of … Read more
Most explanations of diodes start with the junction and stop there, which leaves out the part that determines whether the part in your hand behaves like the one in the datasheet. The junction is a few micrometres thick; everything around it — the crystal, the package, the wire and the test — is what a … Read more
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