Right on. The only thing is that analog is increasingly becoming integrated into SOCs which erodes the domain of a pure analog engineer (at least at the board level). There is still huge demand for system hardware engineers with a strong background in analog but also adept at scripting and dealing with digital systems and in fact, at my company in the bay we have tons of vacancies for analog system engineers. Our problem is in finding candidates with enough breadth and experience. Incidentally, if anyone is looking and fits the bill....
For the record, you don't wave solder a BGA, you reflow solder it. Hopefully your company takes a fraction of your big bucks and pays a manufacturing engineer that actually knows what they are doing.
I think you mean Motorola is further splitting themselves up after having spun off its semiconductor components division as On Semi in 1999 and its semiconductor products division as Freescale (arguably the 'real' Motorola - inventor of the 68000 uP) in 2004. Motorola at this point is just an uninspired electronics company with little to no relevance in consumer handheld devices that also makes crummy radios and network products.
I was just in the Incheon airport and not only do they have free wifi throughout the terminal, but many internet PCs freely available for anyone to use. I guess the real news here is that someone passed up on an opportunity to charge $2/hr or whatever for wifi in this country.
Thankfully my town has a really great local source for impartial reviews of every restaurant in town so we don't have to deal with yelp or citysearch or whatever:
There is a free open source alternative to Eagle called Kicad for schematic drawing and pcb layout. I have never tried it because I use DXdesigner at the office and my personal projects have not yet exceeded the capability of expresspcb.
I would probably go with eagle if I were setting up a new design shop because there is something to be said for having paid support people available to help when needed.
One thing that I recently learned is that in the context of a power converter, the diode will actually induce loss in the fet, and that will usually be the main contributor of loss. Of course there is a tradeoff between on resistance and gate capacitance, but it is important to pick good fast diodes to minimize loss.
If you are just making a load switch however, and are losing power to ohmic loss then you are stuck with picking a better package or paralleling them for better net on resistance. D2PAKs are good.
Or go to a higher voltage and do point of load conversion.
yeah lecroys are ok, but the damn things go through a 5 second recalibration procedure every time you change the time or voltage division scaling by more than two clicks. most annoying scope i've ever used.
tek for me, but those features you mention are common in both Tek and A scopes.
I guess conformal coating or potting or even soldermask would turn it into an embedded microstrip problem but I am not aware of any impedance calculators that solve embedded microstrip for different relative permittivities above and below the trace, but then again I just deal in slow 100MHz logic which would work fine even with 30% deviation in characteristic impedance.
That's not quite true, the traces on the surface of the motherboard are microstrip regardless of whether there is conformal coating or not.
Stripline requires conducting planes below and above the trace, and no coating material is conductive.
The permittivity of silicone or acrylic is on the same order of magnitude as that of free space so conformal coating would not really introduce dramatic impedance mismatches in microstrip.
To me, the most interesting aspect of the dev kit is that the HP calculator group did not even have the engineering resources available internally to draw that simple little schematic and instead outsourced the hardware design to the Taiwanese design and manufacturing house Inventec.
Pretty sad that HP - once a premier engineering company - does not even design their own hardware anymore.
I also like how they created the pdf version of the schematic with a trial version of some pdf writer.
Most cell phones I've ever dealt with (read verizon) have a poorly implemented vibrate feature which is louder than the actual ringer in most cases.
The point of the vibrate function is to provide inaudible tactile feedback so the phone can discreetly get your attention, and my old Nokia got it right by pulsing the vibrations.
Most of the models associated with verizon have an unnecessarily loud buzzer audible throughout lecture halls of several hundred people. And it seems like they are proud of it, having incorporated the distinctive buzzing into their television commercials with that chubby redhead kid who was instant messaging at work on the can.
Also, my old Nokia phone was smart enough to realize that if it was plugged in and charging then it was probabaly not in my pocket so there was no reason for it to vibrate. Not so with my newer LG POS.
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Right on. The only thing is that analog is increasingly becoming integrated into SOCs which erodes the domain of a pure analog engineer (at least at the board level). There is still huge demand for system hardware engineers with a strong background in analog but also adept at scripting and dealing with digital systems and in fact, at my company in the bay we have tons of vacancies for analog system engineers. Our problem is in finding candidates with enough breadth and experience. Incidentally, if anyone is looking and fits the bill....
More likely a gimmick by Dolby Laboratories, Inc (NYSE:DLB) to sell more audio processors and make more money.
For the record, you don't wave solder a BGA, you reflow solder it. Hopefully your company takes a fraction of your big bucks and pays a manufacturing engineer that actually knows what they are doing.
I think you mean Motorola is further splitting themselves up after having spun off its semiconductor components division as On Semi in 1999 and its semiconductor products division as Freescale (arguably the 'real' Motorola - inventor of the 68000 uP) in 2004. Motorola at this point is just an uninspired electronics company with little to no relevance in consumer handheld devices that also makes crummy radios and network products.
I was just in the Incheon airport and not only do they have free wifi throughout the terminal, but many internet PCs freely available for anyone to use. I guess the real news here is that someone passed up on an opportunity to charge $2/hr or whatever for wifi in this country.
Thankfully my town has a really great local source for impartial reviews of every restaurant in town so we don't have to deal with yelp or citysearch or whatever:
http://www.santabarbara.com/Dining/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermilab#Failure_of_magnets
I didn't realize that Fermilab had supplied the component that failed and brought down the LHC until coming across this tidbit in wikipedia.
How convenient for Fermilab that they have found (bought?) themselves more time to beat LHC to the higgs punch.
There is a free open source alternative to Eagle called Kicad for schematic drawing and pcb layout. I have never tried it because I use DXdesigner at the office and my personal projects have not yet exceeded the capability of expresspcb.
I would probably go with eagle if I were setting up a new design shop because there is something to be said for having paid support people available to help when needed.
One thing that I recently learned is that in the context of a power converter, the diode will actually induce loss in the fet, and that will usually be the main contributor of loss. Of course there is a tradeoff between on resistance and gate capacitance, but it is important to pick good fast diodes to minimize loss.
If you are just making a load switch however, and are losing power to ohmic loss then you are stuck with picking a better package or paralleling them for better net on resistance. D2PAKs are good.
Or go to a higher voltage and do point of load conversion.
yeah lecroys are ok, but the damn things go through a 5 second recalibration procedure every time you change the time or voltage division scaling by more than two clicks. most annoying scope i've ever used.
tek for me, but those features you mention are common in both Tek and A scopes.
exactly. here is another article about full spectrum solar cells from 2002:
http://www.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/MSD-full-spectrum-solar-cell.html
I guess conformal coating or potting or even soldermask would turn it into an embedded microstrip problem but I am not aware of any impedance calculators that solve embedded microstrip for different relative permittivities above and below the trace, but then again I just deal in slow 100MHz logic which would work fine even with 30% deviation in characteristic impedance.
That's not quite true, the traces on the surface of the motherboard are microstrip regardless of whether there is conformal coating or not.
Stripline requires conducting planes below and above the trace, and no coating material is conductive.
The permittivity of silicone or acrylic is on the same order of magnitude as that of free space so conformal coating would not really introduce dramatic impedance mismatches in microstrip.
yeah, it's called conformal coating
except the FET which is voltage controlled
The first transistor that came out of Bell Labs was made of GERMANIUM
To me, the most interesting aspect of the dev kit is that the HP calculator group did not even have the engineering resources available internally to draw that simple little schematic and instead outsourced the hardware design to the Taiwanese design and manufacturing house Inventec. Pretty sad that HP - once a premier engineering company - does not even design their own hardware anymore. I also like how they created the pdf version of the schematic with a trial version of some pdf writer.
Most cell phones I've ever dealt with (read verizon) have a poorly implemented vibrate feature which is louder than the actual ringer in most cases.
The point of the vibrate function is to provide inaudible tactile feedback so the phone can discreetly get your attention, and my old Nokia got it right by pulsing the vibrations.
Most of the models associated with verizon have an unnecessarily loud buzzer audible throughout lecture halls of several hundred people. And it seems like they are proud of it, having incorporated the distinctive buzzing into their television commercials with that chubby redhead kid who was instant messaging at work on the can.
Also, my old Nokia phone was smart enough to realize that if it was plugged in and charging then it was probabaly not in my pocket so there was no reason for it to vibrate. Not so with my newer LG POS.
fix them yourself, it's not like we're at your every beckoned call.
damn it, i guess im going to have to sign up for a diners club card to keep up my allofmp3 fix.
that would have to be some design to block the 0.125m wavelengths of wifi but not the .33m wavelengths of cellphones.
My God gets more powerful everyday.
if youre in it for the long haul or you install it on large enough of a scale, with the energy you save over incandescent, it will pay for itself.
turns out most cds explode at 28k rpm according to this story from a couple years back. and even then it was a dupe.
+1 Most organized reply of the day.