If you are new to RF and microwave engineering, take heart! If I may speak for those of us who have spent much of our career in this industry, we love it for its mystery and ever-changing demands. From my observations, there are few people who start out their engineering careers making a direct line…
The Science of Optical Interconnects, Part 2 In the first article of this series, we explored why optical interconnects are attracting renewed attention throughout the electronics industry. Bandwidth requirements continue to grow, and system architects are searching for solutions to challenges involving power consumption, density, and scalability. How does optical fiber actually work? For many…
The Science of Optical Interconnects, Part 1 The history of electronics is full of predictions that turned out to be wrong. One of my favorites dates back to the early days of structured networking. Around thirty years ago, I attended a training course on premises wiring. At the time, 100 Mbps Ethernet was considered cutting-edge…
In the previous articles in this series, I explored how PCIe performance is increasingly defined by the physical channel. The next step is to look beyond the board itself. What happens when PCIe is extended across cables, enclosures, and complete systems? At that point, PCIe stops being just a board-level interface and becomes a system-level…
The latest episode of the Samtec Transmission Line podcast was released last week, and in it, we spoke with the irrepressible Ash from Samtec India. India is a vital market for the global electronics industry. As Ash put it, it’s not the next big opportunity. It is the opportunity. A vast, tech-savvy population combined with…
Designing and evaluating interconnects requires broadband material characterization to determine dielectric properties. Traditional techniques used to characterize the complex permittivity and permeability of dielectrics, such as NRW and NIST, have some important limitations, such as the occurrence of air gaps and resonances in the results, which become even more challenging for broadband applications. In work…
Part 3 – Choosing the Right Interconnect Strategy In the first part of this series, I tried to understand why PCIe becomes more difficult as speeds increase. The conclusion was that as edge rates rise and margins shrink, the physical layer becomes harder to ignore. In the second part, I looked at where control actually…
PCIe is not an area where I would claim deep expertise. My background is mechanical, and most of my day-to-day work focuses on connectors, materials, and geometry rather than protocol specifications. However, PCIe is very important to Samtec. We are involved in shaping the interface itself, and many of our products are designed specifically to…
Connect with Samtec experts at DesignCon 2026 to learn about new and established products and technologies that support data rates up to 448 Gbps and signals up to 130 GHz. As you work on your new designs, Samtec can help you find the optimal interconnect solution–whether it be copper or optics; connectors, cable systems, or…
If there’s one thing high-frequency engineers know all too well, it’s that radio waves are fussy. When a signal operates in the gigahertz range, it becomes delicate. It demands precise timing, perfect alignment, and absolutely no unexpected delays. When several of these signals must arrive together, the challenge becomes one of synchronization. This is where…
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