Issue link: https://resources.mouser.com/i/1442796
Want a Quick-Start to Your Data Port Protection Designs? By Javed Ahmad, Bourns, Inc. Engineers and circuit designers typically look at power and data bus protection last in their design process. Most of us are guilty of this at one time or another. It happens; we are busy and focused on designing and implementing the main function of the system. When we are almost done, we find out that our system must meet certain protection requirements for exposed ports such as USB, SATA, HDMI or VDSL. Most of these requirements are driven by international or local compliance standards where the equipment is targeted to be used/sold, hence mandatory. Well, sweat no more! If you need to design protection for your application in a hurry, we recommend that you read on. Bourns has been working with circuit designers for many decades to solve their circuit protection needs. During this past decade, we saw a growing demand for simple, yet complete protection solutions. We also know that engineers need to be able to quickly build reliable protection into their systems during the prototype stage to test and further optimize to their final requirements. PortNote ® Solutions That's why Bourns ® PortNote ® Solutions were developed: To accelerate our customers' system design and shorten time to market of their final product. PortNote Solutions outline a simple, yet complete protection scheme in an easy-to-read one-page document. PortNote Solutions have been helping designers for more than seven years now. Their popularity has grown over the years and now include 39 PortNote Solutions covering applications in telecom, consumer and industrial market segments. More are being added and updated for relevance to latest compliance recommendations and newer products. How to get the most out of a PortNote Solution Now that we have described what PortNote Solutions are, let's dive into how to make the best use of them to jump-start your protection design. Figure 1 is an example of a popular PortNote Solution for the RS-485 interface. The RS-485 interface is used widely in the industry across many applications in the industrial, communication and consumer space. Let's say that you are using a RS-485 link in your system that runs outside the building and is, thereby, exposed to both inductive and lightning surges. The best place to start in this RS-485 PortNote Solution is to look at the compliance section (Box 2 in Figure 1). Listed are the most common compliance standards that this PortNote Solution targets to meet or exceed. For example, IEC 61000-4-5 relates to lightning and industrial surges caused by power system switching transients and lightning induced voltage and current surges. | 10 |