Optocoupler article and more trade paper review

That stack of trade papers continues to build so I will keep tipping you off to good stuff I find in them as I dig.

Len Schiefer, the chief copy editor over at Electronic Products was nice enough to fix a broken image line on this article about optocouplers. It was figure 1 that caught my eye. This is a nice review of optocoupler types. Toshiba wrote it, but don’t forget my pals at Avago.

A few good things over at EETimes that I will link to despite their laying off some really good people lately: A good article about Intel and their technical acumen. It was when I consulted for Applied Materials where I learned about what a hard-core technical company Intel was. They had this “copy exact” philosophy that meant a mechanical engineer at Applied could not even change a screw on a wafer machine unless every single machine Intel owned was also changed. Same machines, same chemicals, same recipe = same parts. Pretty simple and it works. They can go faster than AMD processors because of their awesome process and manufacturing ability. EETimes also had a decent article about wind power but nothing to top EDN’s own Brian Dipert’s article on wind power. I disagree with Brian about global warming but anyone in their right minds must see the need to conserve energy and explore alternative energy—see the numbers in my article about energy conservation in appliances.

Another article from EETimes but I really wonder—this article talks about how “compelling” a 100-dollar price point will be for Wireless USB dongles. This reminds me of my pal Paul Grohe’s comment about how out of touch Silicon Valley marketing types tend to be. I’m sorry; a wireless USB setup is replacing what— a 2-dollar cable? And this fellow thinks that we will trip over ourselves to give him a hundred bucks to put a complex problematical radio device in place of that 2-dollar cable? Maybe that is why the article talks about developers needing to fix the price and performance. Grohe would listen to all these marketers talking about how whizzy and neat a 600-dollar webpad or Internet appliance would be, and then he would go down and visit his friends in Arizona, where the big family decision was spending 269 dollars on a TV. Most of the people in the US cannot afford to spend 600 dollars for a webpad toy or 100 for a USB cable radio. I am very wary of all these wireless devices. They are sure to start interfering with each other, see my latest article about Wireless. It should be noted that in that article I talk about WirelessUSB (no space before USB), which is a slow-speed Cypress standard, meant to replace mice and HID cords. This article is about wireless USB, the fast standard meant to send high-speed data.

Speaking of my wireless article and how everything is going to interfere with everything else, there is a nice article in Conformity magazine (as well as the pdf you really want) about the difficulties in testing wireless LANs. You can pick up FCC jargon like “intentional radiator” and impress your boss. Electronics Design has a nice write-up about ultra wideband. It comes from Louis Frenzel, the communications and test editor and is pretty hard-core technical.

While we linger at Electronic Design, and speaking of hard-core, my pal Bob Pease has a great write-up about Vbe— the base-emitter drop in transistors. If you love transistors you will love this article. I also like a design idea from Analog Devices where they use the compensation pin of one of their amps to clamp the output swing. I was a bit dismayed to see that Electronic Design does not offer a pdf of the article so you have to click on the figure links to see the figures. I despise this—please write me telling me you despise it too so I can try to get our IT people to put graphics inline with the article. At least EDN offers a pdf version that looks like the printed page. Think about the IT arrogance—they think we are reading EDN online with 480 x 640 monitors and have to print out a pdf to read figures— All I do is click on the pdf and look at the figures on the exact same 24 inch 1920×1200 DPI screen I was trying to read the article on in the first place.

Finally Samtec had a cute ad about their connectors actually working in the real world out to 9 GHz. This is a big deal since my using SMA connectors when I was at National taught me how careful you had to be in order to really launch a high speed signal across a connector. The PCB footprints provided by the vendors were junk, we had to develop our own by trial and error. Some edge-launch SMAs have a big pin and some have a tiny nub better suited for very high-speed signals. Don’t just assume the SMA connector has some special mojo that makes it work—you have to test and measure and characterize and confirm everything, including your scope probes and other test equipment. And when you are putting those SMA connectors on you do use a torque wrench like the one I saw in MPDigest right?