Anablog

As I visited the IEEE IMS show about microwaves and RF last week I could see a very bright future for semiconductors and electronics. For years pundits have been bleating about the next “killer application” for semiconductors. Well I am seeing three of them coming down the pike. First is smart phones. The iPhone changed everything. It not only drove phone replacement sales, it is driving the entire cellular infrastructure. at&t was astonished at the amount of data that people consumed and sent with their iPhones. This means more cellular base station infrastructure, more data infrastructure, more touch screens and a massive amount of analog for cameras and flash drivers and all the other things an advanced phone needs. In countries like India they are passing over the laptop era a...Read More

The formidable Susan Sillitoe sent along a press release informing us that Prism Sound, an audio testing company, will be giving a webinar on June 24 on how to measure sound levels of various headphone types in order to insure your product is not causing hearing damage. They will broadcast the webinar twice, once at 9AM EDT and once again at 1PM EDT. You will have to register to view the material. Worse yet, they will expect you to install software on your machine so you can participate. Perhaps the good folks at Prism don’t understand that IT departments, at least most that I know, don’t give administrator privileges to us peons so I can’t install anything on my...Read More

EDN contributor Eric Bogatin sent along an email notifying me that he will be in Hillsboro Oregon August 11-14. He will be giving two classes; cost for each class is $1500 or $1000 if you are a subscriber. On the 11^th and 12^th he is teaching Essential Principles of Signal Integrity. Topics include:

Build your engineering intuition with this two-day class designed and offered by Signal Integrity Evangelist Dr. Eric Bogatin. In this introductory class, the math is stripped away to reveal the underlying truth of how interconnects affect signal integrity. The most essential principles of signal integrity will be introduced and reviewed, including princi...Read More

I told you DTV sucked a year ago and nothing has changed. The linked article still purports that digital transmissions are more efficient but we all know they are part of a deal to push the broadcasting industry into the corner so the cell phone companies and Google and Intel can use the old analog TV bands. Consumer editor Brian Dipert had a nice article on the shortcomings of the transition. I was glad to see the mainstream media picked up most of my caveats about how you still need an antenna and that you probably need an outside antenna and rotator. I blogged about the trans...Read More

It looks like adding an air traffic control signal to the latest GPS satellite has degraded the GPS accuracy by an order of magnitude. You folks all know these post-production signal integrity disasters. Fortunately for us most of us, our delivered products are not in geosynchronous orbit. From reading the article, it is hard to decide whether the new Boeing or this new Lockheed satellite is a bigger piece of junk. I don’t think the rocket scientists have gotten any worse, but I bet the bureaucrats have joined those at the DMV and Post Office in the national festival of incompetence that seems so prevalent in our public-sector projects. Finding out that you have fundamental signal integrity p...Read More

The last few years several companies have been inventing amplifier classes, not as a legitimate architecture class, but as a marketing trick. The first I heard about was TriPath who called their class-D amplifier a class-T. Interesting to note they are out of business now. Last year a nice marketing guy from Wolfson told me about their new “class-W” amplifier in their new codec. He kept asking me what I thought of the class-W moniker that I assumed he dreamed up. He was a nice guy and Wolfson is a really excellent company, so I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I thought inventing amplifier classes as a marketing ploy only degrades the message. At least they put scare quotes around the name.  I was at Fairchild last week and they talked about a class-F amplifier. I s...Read More

Analog wizard Eric Schlaepfer send me this great video of a Neumann microphone being built. You even get a little of a hot tub being vacuum formed at the end. I love Discovery Channel. Now I want to see “How it’s made, in China” to see how they do the cheap knock-offs. Eric noted:

It's very interesting how they mount the diaphragm. It looks like the plastic film is mounted in tension on the hoop when they place it on the brass capsule part. I imagine they also vacuum deposit the gold electrode while the film is tensioned on the hoop.

Save yourself 5 minutes of Canadian blather (&profanity) and advance to 3:50.

If they had watched the first video, these kids would know better. As wound these avid skateboard artists.

But nothing tops this guy playing Queen so loud it sets off the airbag and knocks him unconscious. Well he was whacking on the steering wheel as well. Then again, maybe the speaker currents coupled into the airbag wiring. That's funny, I don't care who you are...

I guess you can see why we American auto engineers were relucta...Read More

The NY Times has a great article about the satisfaction and joy that comes from working with your hands. The nice quote:

The trades suffer from low prestige, and I believe this is based on a simple mistake. Because the work is dirty, many people assume it is also stupid. This is not my experience. I have a small business as a motorcycle mechanic in Richmond, Va., which I started in 2002…. I have found the satisfactions of the work to be very much bound up with the intellectual challenges it presents.

But here is the deal, the author, Matthew B. Crawford also has a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Chicago. I think all good engineers have an appreciation for hands-on work. It is one of the sa...Read More

A nice article in the Christian Science Monitor reports that engineering enrollments are up 30% at some colleges and 4.5% across the board for undergraduates. Masters degree enrollments are up 7%. Perhaps people are seeing that engineering work is a way to earn your money, as opposed to looting it like our finance types seem to do.

You are welcome to try and comment but the system is broken and our IT department is “working on it”. Blog wizard Brian Dipert says about 1 in 20 comments are going through. I tried to comment to my last post with Explorer 7, Firefox 3 and Opera 9.60 and could not get a comment to post. This is a big deal so it should get fixed soon.

Analog enthusiast Eric Schlaepfer from Maxim Integrated Products sent over this link that describes how Datsun (Nissan) used a tiny phonograph in the 1982 B810 (Maxima) in order to play 6 voice warnings. Vinyl never goes out of style. Eric goes to the electronic flea market and knows many of my pals are record nuts. He told me about some neat Dallas/Maxim microprocessors this weekend—I usually don’t think of Maxim for micros but Eric said to check them out—they have some really cool features.

My ham radio buddy Rob sent this YouTube video that is a great satire of technical doublespeak. If you want to know how we sound to our bosses and spouses and kids, well here it is. Good thing Early voltage only affects common mode rejection ratio and not noise gain. See? That was real tech-speak and it makes about as much sense as this Chrysler ad does to most people. Rob noted:

Pretty good, but I thought these things used a klystron relay in orthogonal conjunction with the stator and that to couple the power an integrator excavator coil was required. Oh well, what do I know? Look under the hood of a modern automobile? I used to think that my '63 Impala with 327 V8 was complex. HAH!!

So next time you try to ...Read More

My buddy and fellow Croatian Andy Turudic sent along this interesting article about some famous people that you didn’t know were engineers. I like to keep track of stuff like this, just as when I pointed out that actress Hedy Lamarr patented spread-spectrum technology during WWII.

Let us know what you think of this list, as well as any other engineers that have changed careers and achieved some small measure of fame.

While at the Embedded Systems Conference I had the pleasure of watching a presentation about an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) developed by a team of students at the École de technologie supérieure (ETS), which even my rusty high-school French tells me is the Superior Technology School. The superiority of the school shows in the vehicle, but also in the students that were involved with the design. It is astonishing that this is an undergraduate project. They call the design S.O.N.I.A. for Système d'Opération Nautique Intelligent et Autonome, which my rusty high-school French translates as “really cool gizmo that drives around the ocean all by itself.”

Analog giant Barrie Gilbert (pdf), inventor of the Gilbert cell, oscillator expert and contributor to EDN as well as an EDN Innovator of the year was nice enough to include me in an email thread about a nanotube radio publicized by the University of California at Berkeley. Since this was a personal email, Barrie wanted to decouple his opinions from that great analog company out in Norwood Massachusetts where Barrie is a Fellow. Barrie wr...Read More