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Indium Corp gains $3.2m DOE TRACE-Ga grant to establish domestic high-purity gallium recovery

Semiconductor today - Mon, 04/27/2026 - 21:23
Indium Corp of Clinton, NY, USA (a supplier of refined gallium, germanium, indium and other specialty technology metals) has been awarded a $3.2m grant by the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation (CMEI) to develop a domestic process for recovering high-purity gallium from manufacturing by-products — a critical step toward establishing a secure, domestic supply chain for a material essential to modern defense systems, semiconductors, and advanced electronics...

onsemi and NIO expand collaboration to accelerate transition to next-gen 900V EV platforms

Semiconductor today - Mon, 04/27/2026 - 21:13
Intelligent power and sensing technology firm onsemi of Scottsdale, AZ, USA has announced an expanded strategic collaboration with China-based car maker NIO Inc to advance next-generation electric vehicle (EV) platforms. Building on a multi-year partnership, the firms are more closely engaging to accelerate NIO’s transition from 400V to 900V architectures, enabled by onsemi’s latest EliteSiC enhanced M3e technology...

Volta Metals receives $215,000 grant from Ontario Junior Exploration Program

Semiconductor today - Mon, 04/27/2026 - 18:45
Mineral exploration company Volta Metals Ltd of Toronto, Canada (which owns, has optioned and is currently exploring a critical minerals portfolio of rare-earths, gallium, lithium, cesium and tantalum projects in Ontario) has received approval for funding of up to $215,000 under the Ontario Junior Exploration Program (OJEP). The funding will support eligible exploration expenditures incurred in 2025 and the first two months of 2026 at its 4750-hectare Springer Rare Earth Element (REE) and Gallium Project, located about 70km east of Sudbury, Ontario, with direct access via the Trans-Canada Highway and Highway 64...

I found a piece of a laptop with a fingerprint scanner from 2007 in a junk bin.

Reddit:Electronics - Mon, 04/27/2026 - 18:39
I found a piece of a laptop with a fingerprint scanner from 2007 in a junk bin.

I found a piece of a laptop with a fingerprint scanner from 2007 in a junk bin. Surprisingly, it works perfectly with Windows 11 and reads my fingerprint without any problems. It requires a 3.3-volt voltage regulator to power it. I 3D-printed the enclosure and came up with a pretty good device.

submitted by /u/SpaceRuthie
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Power Tips #152: Design considerations and topology comparisons for 48V intermediate bus converters

EDN Network - Mon, 04/27/2026 - 15:00

Increasing power demands in data centers demand high-efficiency, high-density power-conversion solutions.

Figure 1 shows a block diagram of power distribution inside an IT tray. A 48V bus bar goes down the back of the rack to distribute power to the IT trays. Inside each tray is hot-swap or e-fuse circuitry to limit inrush current during tray plug-in and to protect the upstream rack during tray failures. Intermediate bus converters (IBCs) convert 48V to the second-stage voltage, usually 12V or 6V. Final-stage multiphase buck voltage regulators complete power delivery by converting the second-stage voltage to the loads, with the majority of power going to sub-1V, high-current processors. In this edition of Power Tips, I will focus on the 48V IBC, covering design considerations, comparing topologies, and discussing system trade-offs of various approaches.


Figure 1 48V IT tray power distribution. Source: Texas Instruments

The IBC power distribution network offers a wide range of power-conversion approaches inside an IT tray (Reference 1). As the system architect, you have three main design choices:

  • A modular or discrete solution (also known as chip-down design).
  • Regulated, unregulated (also known as fixed ratio) or semiregulated IBC operation.
  • The second-stage bus voltage to maximize system performance.

When selecting a modular or chip-down design power converter, your main trade-off will be power density vs. board design flexibility. Power modules, as shown in Figure 2a, are highly optimized solutions built on high-layer-count printed circuit boards (PCBs) (usually more than 16), offering prequalification and the highest power density. The drawbacks of power modules are a lack of flexibility, with fixed footprints and set features, as well as a higher cost per watt.

Chip-down designs, as shown in Figure 2b, are highly flexible solutions that offer footprint and feature freedom, with a lower cost per watt in high-volume production. Their drawbacks include longer upfront time and greater cost investments to qualify the design.

(a) (b)

Figure 2 48V IBC design examples of modular (a) and chip-down design (b) approaches. Source: Texas Instruments

When considering the output regulation of the IBC, your choice depends on two main factors: the load being powered and the operating range of the IBC’s input bus voltage. When the IBC directly drives 12V loads such as cooling fans, hard drives and Peripheral Component Interconnect Express cards, only a fully regulated output voltage (Reference 1) will ensure component safety. In modern data centers, the tray voltage has a more stable, narrow range, typically 40V to 60V. This narrow input range gives you the option to use higher-efficiency and higher-power-density fixed-ratio or semiregulated IBCs. The regulated second-stage voltage regulators following the IBC stage can absorb fixed-ratio IBC output voltage fluctuations.

Your third design choice is the second-stage voltage delivered by the IBC. Equation 1 determines system efficiency (ηsystem):

ηsystem = ηIBC x ηPDN x ηVR

For a given power load, decreasing the second-stage bus voltage will lower the IBC efficiency (ηIBC), because it must deliver more current at a lower voltage to provide the same output power. Similarly, for the motherboard power distribution network (PDN), which distributes current from the first-stage IBC to the second-stage voltage regulator, the PDN efficiency (ηPDN) will also decrease because of increased I2 x R ohmic losses. The benefit of a lower second-stage bus voltage is apparent when using final-stage, high-frequency, high-current voltage regulators with significantly reduced voltage-related switching losses. This results in higher second-stage efficiency (ηVR) and a potentially smaller size of the second stage.

Unlike a buck converter-dominated second-stage voltage regulator, a first-stage IBC has a wide range of power delivery approaches and thus a wider variety of power-conversion topologies available. In most modern IT applications, isolation for safety purposes is not required, so your power topology options increase further when you can consider transformerless options. Figure 3 shows four popular options for IBC module and chip-down designs.

The full-bridge converter shown in Figure 3a is a simple buck converter-derived transformer-isolated topology. The full-bridge converter’s strengths are ease of regulation and the ability to easily scale the intended output voltage by adjusting the transformer turns ratio for your chosen second-stage bus voltage. One drawback of the full-bridge converter is that transformer design is key to its performance, requiring a high-layer-count PCB that limits the topology to module-based designs. Another drawback of the full-bridge converter is that the primary devices are hard-switched, limiting power density and efficiency.

The transformer-isolated inductor-inductor-capacitor (LLC) converter shown in Figure 3b looks very similar to the full-bridge converter but uses an additional capacitor and two inductors to eliminate switching-related losses in the primary devices, enabling high efficiency and high power density (Reference 2). The LLC converter has the same transformer-related strength (an easily scalable output voltage) and weakness (it’s limited to module-based designs) as the full-bridge converter. The LLC converter operates with the highest efficiency at the resonant frequency set by the additional passive components (CR and LR), with efficiency decreasing as you move away from the resonant frequency to regulate the output voltage. For this reason, the LLC converter’s most common application in IBCs is fixed-ratio designs, always operating at the resonant frequency, ensuring the highest efficiency.

Two other popular topologies, the hybrid switched-capacitor (HSC) converter (Reference 3) shown in Figure 3c and the basic buck converter shown in Figure 3d, both offer benefits for chip-down designs because of their lack of AC-dependent power transformers. The HSC converter has a natural step-down ratio of 4-to-1, making it a strong candidate for high-efficiency 48V to 12V IBCs. The addition of flying capacitors limits the power density and hinders this converter’s operation in boost mode, making it a good fit for semiregulation, as regulating only occurs in step-down buck converter mode.

Because the HSC converter has a natural step-down ratio of 4-to-1, scaling the output voltage down further to an 8-to-1 6VOUT design (for example) is more challenging than it would be for the full-bridge and LLC converter options because the HSC converter must rely instead on a longer freewheeling period, requiring a larger output filter inductor, decreasing power density and efficiency.

The buck converter is the most common topology in power electronics, used exclusively in the second-stage voltage regulator, so it is natural to want to apply this simple and well-known approach to the IBC stage as well. The challenge with using a buck converter in the higher-voltage IBC application is that the power devices experience the highest voltage and current stresses when compared to the other topologies, limiting efficiency and power density.

(a) (b)
(c) (d)

Figure 3 Popular IBC topologies: full-bridge converter (a); LLC converter (b); HSC converter (c); and buck converter (d). Source: Texas Instruments

Table 1 compares the different topologies and trade-offs.

  Full-bridge converter LLC converter HSC converter Buck converter
Module or chip-down design Module Module Both Both
Regulation type Regulated Fixed ratio Semiregulated Regulated
Efficiency Medium High High Low
Power density Medium High Medium Low
Output-voltage scalability High High Medium Medium
Complexity Medium High High Low

Table 1 Comparing IBC topology characteristics.

 With the maturation of gallium nitride (GaN) power devices (Reference 4), which have much lower switching-related charges compared to traditional silicon metal-oxide semiconductor field-effect transistors (MOSFETs), simpler topologies like the buck converter topology become more attractive and viable options for higher-voltage applications like IBCs. See Table 2.

  100V Texas Instruments GaN semiconductor 100V silicon MOSFET Difference
VDS (V) 100 100  
RDS(on) (mΩ) 1.1 1.7 35% lower
QG (nC) 27 106 75% lower
QOSS (nC) 98 205 52% lower
QGD (nC) 2.5 26 90% lower
FOM1 = QG x RDS(on) 29.7 180.2 83% lower
FOM2 = QOSS x RDS(on) 107.8 348.5 69% lower
FOM3 = QGD x RDS(on) 2.75 44.2 93% lower
Package
(mm x mm = mm2)
4 x 6.5 = 26
FET with gate driver
5 x 6 = 30
Discrete FET
13% smaller

Table 2 Comparison of 100V GaN and silicon-based IBC semiconductor options.

The IBC power distribution network offers the widest range of power-conversion approaches of the systems inside an IT tray for good reason. As power requirements and architectures rapidly evolve, the best way to optimize performance for 48V IBCs changes. And as additional variables such as highly improved GaN semiconductors get thrown into the equation, it becomes even more important to understand design considerations, topology comparisons and trade-offs.

References

  1. Hsu, C., L. Olariu, S. Zou, et al. “48V Onboard Power Solution Requirements.” Open Compute Project, Version 1.0.0, Nov. 15, 2024.
  2. McDonald, Brent. “Overview of a planar transformer used in a 1kW high-density LLC power module.” Texas Instruments technical article, 2025.
  3. Li, C., and J.A. Cobos. “A Switched Capacitor and Autotransformer Hybrid Converter With DC Current in the Windings,” in IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics 37 (2), February 2022, pp. 1870-1884.
  4. Gallium nitride (GaN) power stages, Texas Instruments.

David Reusch is a systems engineer on the data center team at Texas Instruments, specializing in power electronics. David has more than 20 years of experience in power electronics, ranging from cutting-edge gallium nitride (GaN) technology to high-reliability space-grade DC-DC converters. He received his B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Virginia Tech.

 

Related Content

The post Power Tips #152: Design considerations and topology comparisons for 48V intermediate bus converters appeared first on EDN.

Inside a 1970s Landis&Gyr 2kV lab supply

Reddit:Electronics - Mon, 04/27/2026 - 14:57
Inside a 1970s Landis&Gyr 2kV lab supply

Thing of beauty! Wanted to clean it before testing it but its so pristine inside :O

submitted by /u/XDFreakLP
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SweGaN wins commercial orders worth SEK25m from global customers

Semiconductor today - Mon, 04/27/2026 - 13:11
SweGaN AB of Linköping, Sweden — a manufacturer of custom gallium nitride on silicon carbide (GaN-on-SiC) epitaxial wafers, based on proprietary growth technology — says that it has secured multiple new commercial framework agreements from customers across Europe, Asia, and the USA. The orders received during the first four months of 2026 represent a total contract value of about SEK25m and will contribute to revenue over the next coming 6-18 months...

Чорнобиль: щоб ніколи знову

Новини - Mon, 04/27/2026 - 12:00
Чорнобиль: щоб ніколи знову
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Інформація КП пн, 04/27/2026 - 12:00
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Сорок років відділяє нас від техногенної катастрофи, що сталася на Чорнобильській АЕС. Тоді в  Україні радіоактивна хмара накрила 12 з 25 областей – 2293 населених пункти. Але Чорнобиль – це не лише велика трагедія, а й безмежна мужність наших людей, які ліквідовували наслідки аварії. Ризикуючи життям і здоров'ям, вони захистили людство  від згубного впливу й поширення радіації. Ще живі учасники і сучасники тих подій, жива пам'ять. І в серці кожного з нас одне: щоб ніколи знову.

Engineering the perfect flow with peristaltic pumps

EDN Network - Mon, 04/27/2026 - 08:58

In modern engineering, precision fluid control is vital across industries ranging from electronics manufacturing to medical device design. Peristaltic pumps, with their distinctive squeeze-and-release mechanism, deliver exceptional reliability, cleanliness, and accuracy in fluid transfer. By preventing direct contact between the pump and the fluid, they ensure contamination-free operation while reducing maintenance demands.

This post explores the fundamentals of peristaltic pumping and how electric-drive systems help engineers achieve the perfect flow in today’s most demanding applications.

Peristaltic pump vs. electric peristaltic pump

A peristaltic pump refers to the general pumping principle: fluid is moved through flexible tubing by a rotating squeeze-and-release motion. This design ensures accurate flow and prevents contamination since the fluid never touches the pump components.

An electric peristaltic pump, however, is a specific implementation powered by an electric motor. The motor provides consistent speed, programmable control, and higher precision, making it ideal for industrial automation, laboratory dosing, and electronics manufacturing processes. While the term “peristaltic pump” covers the entire category, “electric peristaltic pump” highlights the modern, motor-driven versions that engineers rely on for efficiency and repeatability.

Figure 1 A sample of today’s compact electric peristaltic pump—this battery-operable low-voltage DC motor version demonstrates modern design efficiency. Source: Author

Peristaltic pumps vs. dosing pumps

A dosing pump is a broader category of pumps designed to deliver exact volumes of fluid at controlled intervals. Peristaltic pumps can serve as dosing pumps when paired with electric drives and programmable controls, but other pump types—such as diaphragm or piston pumps—are also used for dosing applications.

In short, all electric peristaltic pumps can function as dosing pumps, but not all dosing pumps are peristaltic. Understanding this distinction helps engineers select the right solution depending on whether the priority is contamination-free transfer, chemical compatibility, or ultra-precise dosing.

As a quick aside, it’s worth noting the distinction between DC-motor-driven and stepper-motor-driven peristaltic pumps. DC motors provide continuous rotation with simple speed control, making them cost-effective and compact for general fluid transfer.

Stepper motors, on the other hand, deliver precise incremental motion, enabling highly accurate dosing and repeatability. The choice between the two depends on application requirements: DC motors excel in straightforward pumping tasks, while stepper motors are favored in laboratory and industrial settings where precision is paramount.

Figure 2 A stepper-motor peristaltic pump delivers responsive start-stop and reverse operation, offers a wide speed range, and ensures reliability, thus meeting the accurate and dependable flow control demanded by precision instruments. Source: Author

The inner workings of peristaltic pumps

At the heart of a peristaltic pump is a simple but ingenious principle: fluid is transported by compressing flexible tubing in a controlled sequence. As rollers mounted on a rotating rotor travel along the tubing, they push the fluid forward in discrete segments, creating a smooth, continuous flow. Because the fluid remains fully enclosed within the tubing, there is no risk of contamination or contact with mechanical components, making this design particularly valuable in sensitive applications such as pharmaceuticals.

The internal structure of a peristaltic pump reflects this principle with elegant simplicity. A rotor fitted with rollers or shoes provides the pressure needed to move the fluid, while the tubing’s elasticity ensures it returns to its original shape after each cycle. The pump housing supports and guides the mechanism, ensuring consistent operation.

This combination of mechanical precision and material resilience allows peristaltic pumps to deliver accurate dosing, reliable performance, and easy maintenance—qualities that make them indispensable in modern engineering systems.

Figure 3 Drawing simply depicts the mechanisms of single-roller and multi-roller peristaltic pumps. Source: Author

As a closely related note, industrial peristaltic pumps differ from those used in general and medical applications. Industrial designs often employ shoe mechanisms to achieve higher pressures and rugged performance, making them suitable for chemical transfer, mining, and other heavy-duty environments where durability is paramount.

By contrast, general-purpose and medical pumps typically rely on roller mechanisms, which minimize friction, reduce energy consumption, and extend tubing life—qualities essential for precision dosing, sterility, and reliable operation in laboratory and healthcare settings.

And when powered by an electric motor, the same mechanism gains programmable control, variable speed adjustment, and enhanced precision. Electric peristaltic pumps transform the fundamental design into a highly versatile dosing system, capable of delivering exact volumes with repeatability. This evolution from a simple mechanical concept to an automated solution makes them indispensable in neoteric engineering environments where accuracy, efficiency, and reliability are non-negotiable.

Pulsed flow: Quick pointers for makers and engineers

Now to a few compact cues and practical insights to keep your designs flowing with precision. First off take note that motor choice sets the tone for performance: DC drives are cost-effective for simple transfer tasks like irrigation or fluid circulation, while stepper motors deliver the precision required for accurate dosing.

Roller mechanisms are especially suitable for medical and laboratory applications, since they minimize friction, extend tubing life, and provide gentle, contamination-free fluid handling. They also make an excellent choice for hobbyist projects, offering simplicity, reliability, and low maintenance for makers experimenting with fluid transfer.

By contrast, shoe mechanisms are designed for rugged industrial environments where higher pressures are needed, though they accelerate tubing wear. Tubing selection is equally critical; silicone ensures biocompatibility, PVC covers general transfer needs, and specialized elastomers withstand aggressive chemicals.

Now recall that roller pumps themselves come in single-roller and multi-roller designs. Single-roller pumps are mechanically simpler, lower-cost, and easier to maintain, making them suitable for basic transfer or hobbyist projects where flow smoothness is less critical.

Multi-roller pumps, by contrast, provide smoother, more continuous flow with reduced pulsation, which is essential in medical and laboratory applications where dosing accuracy and patient safety matter. While multi-roller designs increase complexity and cost, they extend tubing life and deliver higher precision, making them the preferred choice in food and beverage industries as well.

Also, electric drives add programmable control and variable speed, enabling integration with MCUs or PLCs for automation, while compact low-voltage battery-operated designs balance efficiency with portability in point-of-care devices. Notably, to mitigate the risk of power outages, contemporary electric peristaltic pumps for medical applications are frequently equipped with hand cranks for manual fluid delivery.

In today’s market, DC drive versions are available with more than just a regular DC motor—many include extra leads for speed control inputs (often via pulse width modulation), tachometer outputs, and other control/feedback signals. These additions give designers greater flexibility in monitoring, closed-loop control, and seamless integration with modern embedded systems, making even basic DC drives far more versatile than before.

Figure 4 Datasheet snippet highlighting a brushless peristaltic pump that delivers multiple features, including speed and direction control. Source: Binaca Pumps

Maker tip: PPM-controlled “digital” peristaltic pumps simplify automation by emulating the behavior of standard RC servo motors. Because the motor driver is integrated directly into the pump, you can skip the complex external circuitry usually needed to manage speed or direction. This lets you control the pump directly from a microcontroller’s digital pin using standard libraries—saving you both space and setup time (here is a practical example).

Frankly, when it comes to real-world control challenges, few are as nuanced as those involving peristaltic pumps. The core difficulty stems from two inherent characteristics of their operation. First, these pumps often run at very low speeds, sometimes down to a complete standstill depending on the application. Second, the motor experiences highly variable loads as the rollers engage and disengage with the flexible tube.

For most of the rotation cycle, the rollers move smoothly along the tube with minimal changes in torque or fluid pressure. However, at the points of disengagement and re-engagement, the system encounters sharp pulses in both torque and pressure.

That is, the combination of low-speed operation (which challenges velocity controllers) and cyclic load fluctuations (which creates non-linear disturbances) is exactly what makes these pumps “fussy” to control. Addressing these dynamics requires specialized motion control strategies—but that is a topic for another discussion.

Closing note: Peristalsis in engineering form

I have more to share but let me close with the fundamentals at this time.

Peristaltic pumps are a class of positive displacement pumps inspired directly by biology. Just as peristalsis in the digestive tract moves food through rhythmic muscle contractions, these pumps transport fluids by progressively deforming flexible tubing with rollers or shoes. The motion sweeps fluid forward, but because the swept length is always less than the tubing circumference, each rotation introduces a brief pause, resulting in the characteristic pulsed flow.

Designs vary between fixed and variable occlusion systems: fixed occlusion maintains a constant compression force, while variable occlusion allows adjustment via springs to fine-tune performance. Accuracy is further influenced by the slip factor, a correction term that accounts for incomplete tubing recovery and backflow, which can cause measured dispense rates to differ from theoretical values.

In peristaltic pump engineering, slip refers specifically to tubing recovery and backflow losses, which differs from the slip factor used in turbomachinery but serves the same purpose of correcting theoretical versus actual flow.

In essence, peristaltic pumps mirror a biological process with engineering precision—balancing simplicity, safety, and adaptability across a broad range of applications. In healthcare, they provide sterile infusion for IV therapy, dialysis, and precise drug delivery. In laboratories, they handle chemical dosing, reagent transfer, and bioprocessing where purity is paramount. Industrially, they manage viscous fluids, corrosive chemicals, and food-grade materials without risk of cross-contamination.

In the food and beverage sector, they support hygienic transfer of juices, dairy, and brewing ingredients. For hobbyists, they simplify aquarium maintenance, hydroponics, and small-scale brewing. In agriculture, they excel at nutrient dosing in irrigation and supplement delivery in animal farming. Their gentle, pulsed flow and hygienic design make them a versatile solution wherever controlled, reliable fluid handling is required.

As you explore these designs in your own projects, consider how roller choice, hose selection, occlusion type, and modern drive features can shape performance, and share your insights to keep the conversation on precision fluid handling moving forward.

T. K. Hareendran is a self-taught electronics enthusiast with a strong passion for innovative circuit design and hands-on technology. He develops both experimental and practical electronic projects, documenting and sharing his work to support fellow tinkerers and learners. Beyond the workbench, he dedicates time to technical writing and hardware evaluations to contribute meaningfully to the maker community.

Related Content

The post Engineering the perfect flow with peristaltic pumps appeared first on EDN.

Please go all the way down, RX

Reddit:Electronics - Mon, 04/27/2026 - 08:58
Please go all the way down, RX

If you saw my last post about accidentally frying my CH32V006 dev board into a working state, this is the next chapter of that mess.

Quick recap: I'm building a custom CH32V006 dev board for OpenServoCore, my project to turn cheap MG90S-class servos into smart actuators with a Dynamixel-style single-wire UART. After the 0.84V rail saga, I had a working board. Time to bring up the Rust bootloader (tinyboot) over UART.

Except UART didn't work.

Specifically, TX worked perfectly. I could blast "Hello world" out of the chip all day. But sending anything into the MCU? Total silence. The HAL driver is essentially the same as the V003, which works fine, so I was pretty sure this was hardware, not firmware.

I scoped the RX line while shoving a stream of 0x55 (UUUUUU…) into it from the host. Quick one-liner if you've never used it:

yes U | tr -d '\n' > /dev/ttyACM0

Alternating 1s and 0s, perfect for scoping.

What I expected: a clean 0V to 3.3V square wave. What I got: a 180 mV ripple sitting on top of 3.3V. Min 3.20, max 3.38. The line was being held high so hard that my USB UART adapter could only sag it by a couple hundred millivolts when it tried to send a zero. Touching RX directly to ground snapped it cleanly to 0V, so the wiring was fine. The driver just couldn't drag it all the way down.

Back to the schematic. The RX line passes through a 74LVC2G241 tri-state buffer that handles the half-duplex direction switching. TX_EN low = listen (DATA -> RX), TX_EN high = talk (TX -> DATA). I'd been picturing this buffer as a passive switch, like a piece of wire that conditionally connects two nets.

By now you electronics gods here probably already figured out what's the issue by now, but I didn't...

Anyways, when TX_EN is low, that buffer is actively driving RX with whatever it sees on DATA. And DATA sits at 3.3V via its own 10K pullup when the bus is idle. So the buffer was reading 3.3V on DATA and pushing 3.3V back out of its high-side MOSFET onto RX with ~24 mA of drive and very low R_DS(on). I was fighting a CMOS push-pull output stage with a USB UART chip. The buffer won. Always.

The firmware workaround is to assert TX_EN while reading. That disables the DATA -> RX path and lets RX fall back to its own pullup, which the host can actually drive. Confirmed it live by poking 3.3V onto the TX_EN pad and watching the ripple snap into a clean rail-to-rail square wave. It's such a satisfying flip on the scope.

The real takeaway, however, is thatTX_EN isn't really a transmit enable. From firmware's view it looks like one, but electrically it's a mux select that picks which buffer drives the bus. Calling it "transmit enable" is what put me in this mental hole in the first place.

For Rev B, the actual fix is a hardware jumper that lets RX bypass the buffer for plain UART mode. Why hardware and not just firmware? Because tools like wchisp use the UART to read/write the CH32's Option Bytes outside of any firmware I control. If my UART depends on my firmware to function, a fresh chip or a half-flashed bootloader can lock me out of recovery. Recovery-path peripherals shouldn't depend on firmware to work.

If you want a more details with scope photos, the schematic, a video of the workaround in action, here is the full writeup.

submitted by /u/aq1018
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Teardown of a Keithley 2500 photodiode meter

Reddit:Electronics - Sun, 04/26/2026 - 20:08
Teardown of a Keithley 2500 photodiode meter

Teardown video does go over the related PCBs at the component level, with plenty of components being discussed and pointed at. Discussion of various board sections. Thought it might be of interest to some folks here.

submitted by /u/Kqyxzoj
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Weekly discussion, complaint, and rant thread

Reddit:Electronics - Sat, 04/25/2026 - 18:00

Open to anything, including discussions, complaints, and rants.

Sub rules do not apply, so don't bother reporting incivility, off-topic, or spam.

Reddit-wide rules do apply.

To see the newest posts, sort the comments by "new" (instead of "best" or "top").

submitted by /u/AutoModerator
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Як протидіяти дезінформації: зустріч у КПІ з Міхаєм Вакаріу та Ніколаєм Мокану

Новини - Fri, 04/24/2026 - 22:07
Як протидіяти дезінформації: зустріч у КПІ з Міхаєм Вакаріу та Ніколаєм Мокану
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kpi пт, 04/24/2026 - 22:07
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КПІ ім. Ігоря Сікорського з відкритою лекцією відвідали 🇷🇴 румунський науковець і викладач Міхай Вакаріу, відомий своїми дослідженнями в галузях теорії комунікації, філософії й кінематографа, та директор румунського телеканалу TVR Moldova Ніколай Мокану. Гостей супроводжувала українська поетеса, письменниця й громадська діячка Оксана Стоміна.

КПІ та Ericsson об’єднують зусилля для підготовки майбутніх інженерів із передовими навичками у сфері 5G

Новини - Fri, 04/24/2026 - 22:02
КПІ та Ericsson об’єднують зусилля для підготовки майбутніх інженерів із передовими навичками у сфері 5G
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kpi пт, 04/24/2026 - 22:02
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Після підписання Меморандуму про співпрацю між КПІ ім. Ігоря Сікорського та компанією Ericsson було розпочато реалізацію міжнародної навчальної програми з розвитку навичок у сфері цифрових технологій — Ericsson Educate: 5G University.

Студент першого курсу кафедри штучного інтелекту на Міжнародному конкурсі з фізики

Новини - Fri, 04/24/2026 - 21:42
Студент першого курсу кафедри штучного інтелекту на Міжнародному конкурсі з фізики
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kpi пт, 04/24/2026 - 21:42
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☑️ Олександр Мацибора, студент першого курсу кафедри штучного інтелекту Навчально-наукового інституту прикладного системного аналізу (НН ІПСА) КПІ ім. Ігоря Сікорського, досяг вагомого результату на Міжнародному конкурсі з фізики The International Physics Competition (IPhyC).

AXT announces exercise of over-allotment option in public offering

Semiconductor today - Fri, 04/24/2026 - 19:43
AXT Inc of Fremont, CA, USA — which makes gallium arsenide (GaAs), indium phosphide (InP) and germanium (Ge) substrates and raw materials at plants in China — says that, in connection with its underwritten public offering of 8,560,311 shares of common stock (completed on 22 April), the underwriters have exercised their over-allotment option to purchase an additional 1,284,046 shares at a price of $64.25, yielding additional gross proceeds of about $82.5m, before deducting underwriting discounts and commissions and other offering expenses...

The system architect’s sketchbook: The buildout frenzy

EDN Network - Fri, 04/24/2026 - 18:24

Deepak Shankar, founder of Mirabilis Design and developer of VisualSim Architect platform for chip and system designs, has created this cartoon for electronics design engineers.

The post The system architect’s sketchbook: The buildout frenzy appeared first on EDN.

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