-
- News
- Books
Featured Books
- design007 Magazine
Latest Issues
Current IssueProper Floor Planning
Floor planning decisions can make or break performance, manufacturability, and timelines. This month’s contributors weigh in with their best practices for proper floor planning and specific strategies to get it right.
Showing Some Constraint
A strong design constraint strategy carefully balances a wide range of electrical and manufacturing trade-offs. This month, we explore the key requirements, common challenges, and best practices behind building an effective constraint strategy.
All About That Route
Most designers favor manual routing, but today's interactive autorouters may be changing designers' minds by allowing users more direct control. In this issue, our expert contributors discuss a variety of manual and autorouting strategies.
- Articles
- Columns
- Links
- Media kit
||| MENU - design007 Magazine
Estimated reading time: Less than a minute

Quiet Power: Cable Quality Matters
In my August column, we looked at the importance of properly terminating the cables that connect a measuring instrument to our device under test. We may be surprised to learn that even if we use the correct termination at the end of the cable, the measured waveform may depend on the quality of the cable we use.
To illustrate the point, we will use the same DC-DC converter evaluation board with an LTM4604 buck converter. To eliminate any possibility of ground loops, the converter is powered from a small battery pack with three AA batteries. The load is a small incandescent bulb, taking approximately 1A DC current from the output. We use a 50-ohm coaxial cable with BNC connectors at both ends. One end of the cable is connected to CH1 input of a Tektronix TDS540B oscilloscope. The input is switched to 50-ohm input impedance. The other end of the cable is connected to the BNC socket on the evaluation board, which directly monitors the output voltage. Read the full column here.Editor's Note: This column originally appeared in the October 2013 issue of The PCB Design Magazine.
More Columns from Quiet Power
Quiet Power: An Evolution in PCB Design CostsQuiet Power: The Effect on SI and PI Board Performance
Quiet Power: 3D Effects in Power Distribution Networks
Quiet Power: Noise Mitigation in Power Planes
Quiet Power: Uncompensated DC Drop in Power Distribution Networks
Quiet Power: Ask the Experts—PDN Filters
Quiet Power: Friends and Enemies in Power Distribution
Quiet Power: Be Aware of Default Values in Circuit Simulators