D. C. Smith Consultants
High Frequency Measurement Website
Douglas C. Smith
 
DCS header


High Frequency Measurements Web Page
Index and Technical Tidbits
D-104 mike
Welcome to my High Frequency Measurements Web page. Below you will find links to interesting technical goodies for download, as well as other interesting websites, information on my seminars, and much more. I will be adding to this site weekly, so check back occasionally. Feel free to print out pages on this site and to give them to others, but I ask you to include the complete page with header. Check out the monthly Technical Tidbit article linked at the bottom of this page. Each one will illustrate a design or measurement principle, sometimes what not to do.

HF News is back! If you want to subscribe just send me an email at doug@dsmith.org with "HFNews" as the subject line. There is a link in each issue to unsubscribe if you want to, but you won't! Each issue contains useful technical discussion and links to explore and is short and to the point, like my Technical Tidbits below, so as not waste your time. Each issue can be read in two or three minutes. Your email address will be kept private and never be given or sold to anyone.Here is a link to the January 30, 2017 issue: ESD Issues . Subsequent issues will be archived further down this page.

You may also enjoy my Twitter feed. Just go to http://twitter.com and follow me at @dougcsmith_ee . I usually post short items such as interesting technical links once or twice per day.

Design and Troubleshooting Tips and Techniques: You will find many tips on design and troubleshooting on this site, yet what you see is just the "tip of the iceberg" compared to what is available in my on-site private seminars. The seminars cover many effective design and troubleshooting techniques developed by myself and not taught anywhere else!  Click here to request more information via email.

Quote from a visitor to this site:
"Every time I browse your site, I never get any work done. I spend hours on it and get in trouble."


High Frequency Measurement Partners


EMC Desisgn Advisory Service

High Speed Digital Design Link

Boulder Dam Hotel and Museum
Our office, laboratory, and classrooms are located in the
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Historic Boulder City Dam Hotel and Museum
1305 Arizona Street, Boulder City, Nevada 89005
Phone: (702) 293-3510
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Come for a technical seminar, design review/troubleshooting, or just for a visit and mix a little history of the Old West with your work!


Hangar One
I lived in the Bay Area for years and have many clients in the Bay Area and work with them frequently both on-site and remotely. If you are in the Bay Area and have a technical issue to solve, give me a call!
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The picture on the left was taken on the NASA Ames campus in Mountain View where I have done a lot of work for NASA and others. It is an exciting place.

URLs to Access This Site
http://emcesd.com
(main site)

http://www.dsmith.org and http://DesertLabRat.com
(pointers to emcesd.com)

Courses and Seminars

University of Oxford Logo
Courses at the University of Oxford by Doug Smith
University of Oxford Tutor - Department for Continuing Education
     
    Oxford Conted logo

    University of Oxford Course Tutor
    University of Oxford
    Rewley House
    1 Wellington Square
    Oxford, OX1 2JA
    United Kingdom
    University of Oxford Certificate
    click to enlarge


    Great Design, Troubleshooting, and EMC/ESD Seminars!
    Learn and have fun, all at once at a beautiful, historic venue 22 miles from Las Vegas.
    Attending one of these classes is like insurance against a design or field disaster for your company
    and can add to your company's financial results immediately (this quarter)!

    Lab Techniques, Robust Design, and Troubleshooting
    Click here for virtual classes (four half days) limted to 10 attendees
    Click Here for the next live class (three full days)* limited to 6 attendees
    or pick your own dates (contact me for details)
    Why come to this class?  Why come to Boulder City? click here
    Lots of new material have been added to both seminars above that will help you crank out good designs quickly

    * The most fun an engineer can have! Attendance limited to six lucky people for a great experience.

    Boulder City Classroom
    BC Lab
    Boulder City Classroom Setup for Six People
    Boulder City Lab Where We Do Experiments/Demos

    Lab Techniques, Robust Design, and Troubleshooting
    (click here to register and for more information on the live class)
    (click here to register for the vertual, web based class)
    This seminar is fun and covers material not covered in any other seminar by others.
    It is much broader than just EMC/ESD issues, covering my research over many decades.

    (also known as High Frequency Measurements and Noise in Electronic Circuits)
    Click here for more information, including cancellation policy.
    The live seminar is limited to 6 people to insure the best experience and social distancing!
    Click here to see a walk through of the facilities in Boulder City, NV


    Three whole or four half days, one instructor covering great techniques to get your design working and finding defects that could become field failures. In addition, unique and powerful methods of troubleshooting EMC and ESD problems in minutes to hours instead of days to weeks or more are presented. Lots of demos on live circuits illustrate most of the main points covered. People have said this was the best course they have ever taken! Click here for more information. Low cost, and some travel expenses included.

    The seminar includes many design and troubleshooting techniques from my research that have saved my clients millions of dollars and are only available at this seminar. No other event, symposia, seminar, or webinar covers these privately developed techniques.

    NEW: New data for waveform purity and E-field radiation from most modern ESD simulators that will help you select a simulator that will be more likely to fail or pass your product. ESD testing standards do not adequately characterize the simulators leading to inconsistent test results. This data will help make sense of test results.

    The Lab, Design, and Troubleshooting seminar is my three day seminar on design, lab techniques, and  troubleshooting which includes about 1/2 day on EMC in designs, ESD in designs, and troubleshooting and measurement techniques in the design lab. I started this seminar years ago and constantly add and update it. A number of  people have said to me that it is the best course on any topic they and eveqr taken. Almost 50% of time is devoted to demonstrations. This year I have added a new section on exposing low probability failure modes that can present safety or other problems that can be a field disaster. There is content on my unique EMC/ESD troubleshooting techniques, but in addition, there is a lot of content on just getting the design to work in the first place or to troubleshoot it later on.

    This class is held in the Boulder Dam Hotel, a restored National Landmark Building that hosted the dignitaries who came to visit Hoover Dam during its construction. To visit the Boulder Dam Hotel website, click here.



    About Boulder City, NV

    Boulder City, NV is a small, quiet town that once was home to the workers that built Hoover Dam. There is plenty to see within a few blocks of the seminar venue shown in the picture below. It is located about 6 miles from Hoover Dam and about 22 miles from Las Vegas. Boulder City is the opposite of Las Vegas, but the glamor of Las Vegas is not too far away if you want to go there. I often say that being in Boulder City is like living in the 1950s but with very high speed Internet. Follow the links below for more information.
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    Boulder City Dam Hotel and Museum
    For more pictures of Boulder City, NV click here
    For more information on Boulder City, NV click here
    For more information on the Boulder City Dam Hotel and Museum, the site of the seminar click here






    Click here, to see descriptions and registration information on my one hour webinars than can solve difficult design problems quickly. Touching on topics like signal integrity, EMC, ESD, and general analog and digital design, these webinars are a quick way to get your design working. There are public presentations most weeks as well as private presentations on demand with a new simplified, lower cost price structure. New webinars are added periodically.


    Wireless Charging and Power Transfer - Problems and Solutions
    Friday, June 14th, 2019 at 10 a.m. PDT (US)
    iPhone on wireless charger

    Wireless charging has several problems including noise injection into the system structure that can lead to EMC issues. Many such devices get past EMC testing by limiting the way EMC testing is done to benign cases. This webinar will demonstrate the problems and possible solutions in a live lab environment as opposed to just showing slides. Target is for a one hour presentation but the length may vary depending on audience participation and may go longer.

    The cost is lower than most webinars at $100/person capped at $500 per location, so that even individuals can afford to attend that will not be reimbursed by their employer. If you have several people that can attend, the cost becomes very low per person. Private delivery for a group is $500.

    Please call/text/or email me before registering to make sure there is a spot for you. Cell: +1-408-858-4528, doug@dsmith.org

    Registration form link

    Featured Suppliers:
    (click on logo to visit their site)
    The EMC Shop



    You can find lots of audio and video podcasts on various topics of technical interests. Most of them are from a few years ago and were on my paid website emcesd-p.com but are still current and useful, and now free. I will be adding podcasts regularly in the future. This has been made possible by the continuing decline in costs of bandwidth. Click here to go to my podcast page or go directly to my papers, articles, and Technical Tidbits on this site!







    Check out one of my non-technical adventures, the Devil Dash, a footrace combined with an obstacle course (barbed wire, mud,  rough terrain, etc.). Click here to see the story. The event took place in Bootleg Canyon, here in Boulder City, NV March 23, 2013, on a much colder than normal day.
    I finished faster than 90% those entered, who on average were less than half my age (67), including finishing faster than 82% of the 20-25 year old group!
    2022 update: Currently I am running in the top 1% of all runners of all ages for mileage per month according to Strava (200-250 miles per month)!

    Exiting barbed wire/mud obstacle


    Technical Tidbit:  
    My latest Technical Tidbit appears at the bottom of this page. Click here to go to the bottom of this page for the article (but you will miss more than 250 papers and articles in-between).

    Have a tough design problem? Design problems can be very costly. Even if caught in the lab, precious resources can be wasted tracking such problems down. My private seminars cover design and troubleshooting techniques I developed that are not taught by anyone else! These techniques have solved tough problems in a day or two after design teams had struggled with the problems for weeks or months, not to mention avoiding the problems in the first place. Click here to request more information.

    Design troubleshooting and verification: Tracking down design problems in the lab can be time consuming. My public seminars and my private on-site seminars include new information to minimize debug time. The difference can be hours to a solution instead of weeks! Click here to hear a 1 minute, ~128K, audio clip discussing the seminar.




    Book image


    Click here for more information, books, seminars, and  consulting on high frequency measurement, design, troubleshooting, signal integrity, and EMC.


              
    Doug's iNarte certificate
    (click on the image to enlarge the certificate)

    University of Oxford Certificate
    (click on the image to enlarge the certificate)



    Doug setting up for an ESD test
    Doug, setting up for an ESD test.

    Check out my interview on EEWeb! Click here to see the interview.



    Unique and Useful Instruments

    Technical Information and Published Papers

    Technical Tidbits (archi

    Technical Tidbits (archived, current article is at bottom of this page)

    Talks and Presentations

    The links listed here are Adobe Acrobat (pdf) files containing the visuals of recent talks and presentations I have given to various groups. You will need Acrobat Reader V4.0 or better to read the files as well as a password. If you have attended one of  these presentations, then you already have the password, if not and you would like to view the file, click here to request the password. Keep in mind that the visuals only cover about 50% or less of my presentations. Live demonstrations and discussion of past experiences make up most of these talks.

    Links to Interesting Sites and Events

    Information About My Seminars

    Information About Myself

    Miscellaneous


    Technical Tidbit - November 18, 2022
    Differences Between ESD Simulators Can Have A Significant Effect on Test Results

    ESD simulator current and E-field plots
    Click on the picture to read the article.

    Abstract: This Technical Tidbit describes the substantial differences between ESD simulators that have a major effect on the outcome an ESD compliance test.


    Technical Tidbits - April 2021
    Remote EMC Problems

    Abstract:
    This Technical Tidbit covers a an example of an EMC problem that appears to be in one part of a system but, in fact, originates in a remote part of the system far from the observed problem.

    Diagram of EMC problem
    Click on the picture to read the article.

    Design Rules of Thumb

    Abstract: This Technical Tidbit covers a number of design rules of thumb I have encountered in my life, some pertain to electrical design, and some to physical design. Some I have developed for my work. They are presented as a video and a set of slides.

    gasket design
    Click on the picture to read the article.


    Interested in more information on this and related topics? Click here for a schedule of upcoming design and measurement seminars.

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    Questions or suggestions? Contact me at doug@dsmith.org
    Copyright © 1999-2019 Douglas C. Smith