Thermal design is an important consideration in any power electronic converters. An optimized thermal design enables engineers to use GaN in a wide range of power levels, topologies, and applications. This application note discusses the most important tradeoffs and considerations for TI’s LMG341XRxxx GaN power stage family, including guidance for PCB layout, thermal interface, heat sink selection and mounting methods. Examples of designs using 50-m Ω and 70-m Ω GaN devices will also be provided.

Crystal oscillators and/or multiple output clock generators are critical in today’s high performance consumer, computing and communications systems. Deciding an optimal clock rate for the system can sometimes require several rounds of prototyping and validation. Clock Generator and Oscillator ICs with the right hooks to margin the synthesized clock can help to streamline the overall product development cycle and optimize performance of the end system. LMK03328 and LMK03318 are TI’s high performance programmable clock generators with 100fs (typical) integrated RMS jitter (12 kHz – 20 MHz) that also support multiple frequency margining modes. This application note will describe the benefits of frequency margining in various applications, highlight common approaches in the industry for frequency margining and describe the flexible frequency margining features on LMK03328 and LMK03318 that are preferred by system architects.