Google is offering to produce free chips for you. They have to be open source, they are using 20 year old technology and you'll get 100 of them. Could someone reverse engineer a SID-chip and have Goggle start to crank those suckers out?
https://www.theregister.com/2020/07/03/open_chip_hardware/
https://fossi-foundation.org/2020/06/30/skywater-pdk
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Google Will Fab Your Chips for Free
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06 2020, @11:55PM (3 children)
There are two issues:
Patents, what has expired?
SW, the part would not be much use if there was nothing to make a load for it.
Maybe a good performance Arduino processor with gates, flops, and sram on the side.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by driverless on Tuesday July 07 2020, @12:31AM
That was my immediate reaction as well: A very limited custom ASIC using 20-year-old tech or anything you want using a current FPGA. I guess it's neat for student assignments but I can't see what else you'd do with the capability.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @06:22AM
The basic FPGA patents have expired, though as always, much of all the other circuitry remains a patent minefield. Timeline, 20 years ago would place you around the Virtex-E - Virtex II days (Xilinx) so don't expect too much computationally.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 08 2020, @10:55AM
20 years for tech patents is way too long. A petition to reduce tech patent lengths is in order.
(Score: 5, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @12:00AM (15 children)
Google is doing something, and I can't find any evil intentions. It's like 2002 again.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @12:07AM (5 children)
They take your open source design, add the backdoor for Mossad, then ship you 100 chips for free.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @12:48AM (4 children)
Joke's on them, they'll spend more to add the backdoor and the chips I would be using won't even know Internet exists.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @12:56AM (3 children)
Joke's on you... you won't even know they created a wireless link to the Internet using a protocol you haven't heard of.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @01:11AM (1 child)
Neutrino-Assisted Router Communication
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Kell on Tuesday July 07 2020, @06:58AM
NARC for short.
Scientists ask questions. Engineers solve problems.
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @03:21AM
Inside an earthed Faraday cage, in the middle of nowhere, running on batteries charged from small solar panels.
I don't think there's a physical process that can support, on a low energy budget, that wireless link and protocol I haven't heard of.
So, yeah, joke's still on them.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Tuesday July 07 2020, @12:20AM (3 children)
https://fossi-foundation.org/2020/06/30/skywater-pdk [fossi-foundation.org]
Doesn't seem to be much evil potential, unless you portray it as a nefarious low-cost way for Google to get a bunch of open source hardware designs that they will build on and make into new proprietary chips.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 4, Funny) by krishnoid on Tuesday July 07 2020, @12:43AM (2 children)
So *that*'s their evil plan!
Ingenious.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @01:51AM (1 child)
I think they want to know who is self motivated to actually DO stuff. Lotsa people have the "leadership" skill to tell someone else to do stuff. Very few people are personally driven by passion to actually do it.
Google wants to know who they are.
I have already seen the disaster of placing passionate designers subordinate to PHB types. Both sides fight, and the one who controls the employment status of the other always wins, while the other is dismissed, often because of a "bad attitude".
Google has seen what happened at some former top notch MIC corporations as they bled off their passionate engineers and retained their handshakers.
It was passionate engineers at JPL, NASA, Autonetics, and many other companies that got men to the moon. But that seems to have died out as those in search of ever higher profit and cost cutting took over control, and now we get planes that have serious errors in design, stuff that has minimal acceptable utility, planned obsolence, landfills full of junk, and copyright patent messes where farmers can't maintain their machines.
I think Google has a lot to gain by finding who comes wired, right out of the womb, with a passion for creating new stuff.
While other corporations hire the "leadership" skills to evaluate employees on ass kissing finesse.
It happened to me. Nicolai Tesla had the same problem. Galileo. Socrates.
Think Steve Wozniak could have held onto a job under a modern management style type PHB?
If you are a creative type, you either have to work for yourself or directly with the owner of the company.
If even ONE suit-and-tie handshaker gets between you and the company owner, it's game over. Any contribution you make puts the more highly paid handshaker in competition with you and will use his privilege of rank to place obstacles in your path, withold information, to justify your dismissal before the top guy finds out.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @03:35PM
Don’t be so down on the PHB they figured out how the system works and are working it, successfully, to their advantage
(Score: 5, Interesting) by rigrig on Tuesday July 07 2020, @01:19AM (1 child)
I'm guessing the non-evil plan is to get more people into hardware design, hopefully improving/cheapening future generations of hardware. They are a software company after all [joelonsoftware.com]. (and with any luck find some talented people to hire for their neural-net processor design team)
Evil plan: they predict/noticed the rise of a low-end custom chip market and want to pre-emptively monopolize it. Good luck with that hobbyist foundry startup, now that Google is throwing money at giving away your product for free.
No one remembers the singer.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by DECbot on Tuesday July 07 2020, @04:34PM
Evil Plan: They are looking for chip designer to make clever & novel ways to design circuits and forcing them to open source the design so they can scoop it up on the cheap for their own chips for their data centers. I'm inclined to believe they are looking for low power draw, simplicity, and IOPS per watt chips manufactured on low end lithography/LPCVD/etc equipment that is cheaper to run and easier to maintain high chip yields. Instead of hiring a bunch of chip designers, they will encourage and scrap from open source chip designs and have their engineers compile a google version for themselves--just how they built their software stack.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Tuesday July 07 2020, @02:29AM
Yes, but this is 2020, so you can be sure Google has something in mind that's not in your best interest - otherwise they would openly disclose what it is they're getting out of the deal. TINSTAAFL...
(Score: 3, Funny) by Lagg on Tuesday July 07 2020, @02:41AM (1 child)
There can still be a deep financial incentive for a company that sees the writing on the wall to make fab domestic and make themselves appealing [skywatertechnology.com] so they can use the machines they would have to keep spinning anyway to get free PR points. It seems kind of logical for an ad company to advertise in this indirect way.
Low batches of not-really-dense wafers (god I hope I'm using the terms right here, I don't know fab science lower than opcode layer very well) on surface area that doesn't back up their production line would seem to be quite an easy project for a company that has as many apparently-competent engineers as Skywater does.
Goog is in dire need of "don't be evil" points and both them and Skywater are parasites. So ultimately the idea might be to entrench themselves and Skywater as the "domestic chip fab guys who also did that cool thing for those projects! And it's google too!".
It's like, the guy above you eating popcorn and farting giving you a fresh candy bar in exchange for being quiet about it.
I'm sure if you asked plenty of people though, this is exactly what a good company would do for its shareholders.
I myself hold no opinion. Because I'm okay with being able to study the bare metal layer to an academic extent. And the PDKs will be conducive towards it. Google is an ad and software company (in that order). So it's entirely possible the grand goal here is a guy in management going "Okay I'm sick of the chinese and japanese having us by the balls. I just want to ship our bloated out crap to Android HEAD already. Let's move this domestic and have reliable uninfected firmware while we're at it and get some PR".
I'm sure the ties that Goog management wear are atrocious. And the place is filthy with MBAs. There might be a spectrum of evil there. Especially the ties. Have you ever seen the google campus souvenir shops?
http://lagg.me [lagg.me] 🗿
(Score: 4, Interesting) by DECbot on Tuesday July 07 2020, @05:22PM
I worked in a chip fab about a decade ago--it was more expensive to idle or shutdown the equipment that to keep it running. On any piece of equipment, if it was down for any length of time (measured in hours), it took about half a week to get it to run stable enough and most importantly, clean enough to go back to processing product again. There were many times that equipment when down for maintenance for a routine tube change (typically 12-hours PM), cycle through verification runs and maintenance/troubleshooting for a week or two before going down again for a second tube change before going back into production.
It could be Google/skywater have identified this trend and since the profitable product demand is low, in order to keep the equipment running without dumping product onto the market, they are opting to donate some of their production capacity to open source chip makers.
The second possibility, LPCVD furnaces will run with dummy wafers on the top and bottom of the boat to keep the same number of wafers in the process chamber for each batch in order to maintain the same surface area and thermal properties. These dummy wafers are necessary as the diffusion across these sacrificial wafers are not always uniform. Also, if the batch is for 75 wafers, but the boat holds 150 wafers, fillers are added to fill the boat. Perhaps some passionate engineer convinced some PHB that the boats could be filled with open source wafers, thus getting some productive use out of the fillers besides the process requirements. This would also reduce the thermal cycling of the designated filler wafers--those do have limit of how many times they can be processed before they start breaking in half and causing all sorts of troubles. Donating wafers for open source chips would extend the life of the fillers and dummy wafers, perhaps identify new designer talent, encourage designers to share with google novel new circuits, and as a bonus provide "unlike the other guys, Google isn't evil" PR.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @12:00AM (1 child)
I threw away my last roll of Rubylith last month.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Tuesday July 07 2020, @12:10AM
I have not heard the term "rubylith" for 20 years. It bought back fond memories.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday July 07 2020, @12:16AM (6 children)
Throwing some business their way could be a sign that Google is interested in 3DSoC [ieee.org].
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @01:35AM (4 children)
> Google is interested in 3DSoC [ieee.org].
Could be. But it's certain that takyon is interested in 3D silicon...
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday July 07 2020, @01:39AM (3 children)
Yes. I don't want to see Moore slaw hit a brick wall within the next 10 years.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by coolgopher on Tuesday July 07 2020, @02:47AM (2 children)
Actually, I think that would be a good thing. We'd have a least a decade of two where we'd be able to compensate by unbloating the software instead.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday July 07 2020, @03:07AM (1 child)
Nah, I'll take the orders of magnitude "free lunch" speedup first. There's nothing stopping you from writing or running efficient code, except maybe your bosses and the world at large.
Don't forget that there is also energy efficiency to be gained by moving memory closer to cores, not just performance, and the 3D approach will be beneficial to neuromorphic computing.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Tuesday July 07 2020, @03:17AM
I'd like both, but the state of software isn't going to improve while hardware gains can cover for sloppy coding.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Tuesday July 07 2020, @03:27AM
Throwing some business their way
Adverts for nothing
And your chips for free
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Snotnose on Tuesday July 07 2020, @12:23AM (8 children)
The basics of VLSI are pretty easy to learn for a C programmer. Granted, advanced parts of it are, well, advanced. I"m a retired embedded software engineer, I used to troubleshoot devices and could not only trace bugs to the core VLSI, but tell the engineer how to fix it. Hell, I remember one guy I tried to teach RCS to. His address bus was backwards. That is, A0 swapped with A9, A1 with A8, etc. I convinced him to reverse it, suddenly the display worked. He did another iteration, and it was broken again. Asked him to pull the working version out of RCS, he hadn't saved it. This actually happened 3-4 times before our paths digressed. It wasn't just him, his whole division did not get Software Configuration Management. That's a whole nother story.
So what if the tech is 20 years old? If you get a couple thousand young whipper snappers designing ICs then something useful has to come out of it. If not a useful chip, then someone who learned from their mistakes and went on to bigger and better things.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @12:29AM (5 children)
" If you get a couple thousand young whipper snappers designing ICs then something useful has to come out of it."
yeah, and we were told that if we had a million monkeys banging away at typewriters, shakespeare would pop out. well, we tried that with the internet and we got facebook, twitter, instagram, tik tok, etc. not much useful there...
(Score: 4, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday July 07 2020, @01:22AM (4 children)
Shakespeare was a wiseass troll. He just had the stage as his medium rather than the Internet.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @01:37AM
> Shakespeare was a wiseass troll.
Shakespeare was a wiseass troll with legs.
FTFY
(Score: 3, Funny) by RS3 on Tuesday July 07 2020, @03:43AM (2 children)
So he would've fit right in here. :)
(Score: 4, Funny) by DECbot on Tuesday July 07 2020, @05:35PM (1 child)
Please don't encourage this. When catching up with the latest techie news and commentary, I don't want to read a dialog of long form posts written in archaic rhyming iambic pentameter.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @08:24PM
There once was an admin from Nantucket,
Who chose his chips from a bucket.
When surfing the net
For illicit video to wget
Prompted for ssl cert he said 'Ah fuck it.'
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @02:26AM
his whole division did not get Software Configuration Management
I find this to be very prevalent in very old EE groups. One company I was interviewing for about 2 years ago. I did the "joel test' on them. "we use sourcesafe sometimes usually we just copy files around"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @07:25PM
Your posting history indicates it's past time for you to retire on life.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by looorg on Tuesday July 07 2020, @01:18AM (3 children)
Perhaps I should have written a better summary and not just cobbled a few sentences together and add a few links. I guess I expected a bit more editing or editorializing. My bad.
While the SID part would be lovely I doubt that will happen. As far as I know those things are gone and would have to be recreated. The attempts to do so have been a bit so and so, ok but not quite like the real thing. There are replacements that work "ok", or good enough for the most part.
But overall I was thinking that this might be or could be a nice way to recreate old chips from old machines that are not around anymore, or are really hard to get at -- the SID was just an example really. Leaving Google with the bill for it, or at least allow them to use their McDuck like vault of money to do something good and interesting.
That said I don't think this is yet another Goggle being evil scheme. After all someone that has something secret on a chip wont cheap out and have Goggle make 100 of them for free while at the same time require the entire thing to go open source and be uploaded to Github so that anyone after that can make even more of them. I really don't think they'll add secret backdoors to them either.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday July 07 2020, @01:37AM
Even if they do, they'll be easy enough for everyone to spot, analyze and publish the details of.
Also: backdoor on custom silicon doesn't mean as much as it does in a GPCPU.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by RS3 on Tuesday July 07 2020, @04:01AM (1 child)
Your submission is perfect. Thanks for it and the SID inspiration. Turns out the Google chips can be mixed-signal. Hmmm. I see there are already quite a few hardware clones out there but as of this writing I've done no more research into how good they are. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOS_Technology_6581 [wikipedia.org]
SID needs (wants?) VDD of 12 volts and VCC of 5 volts, so a direct drop-in might not be possible because the Google chip has a max of 10 volts if I'm reading it correctly.
But it may be possible to remove the VDD pin and just run from 5 volts. Research needed. Otherwise might be do-able.
(Score: 3, Informative) by looorg on Tuesday July 07 2020, @12:02PM
As I recall, from memory, the old/first SID (6581) required 12vdd (and 5vcc), then one of the middle versions was 9v but the eventual updated chip (8580) worked with just 5vcc/9vdd. I think this is one of those things, or reasons, that might have killed a lot of chips -- when you install new chips in old revision motherboards and it juiced them with 12v. There was as I recall also slight sound differences with the filters and wave-generations in them so a lot of people seem to prefer the old one.
Most of the current replacement seem to favor the FPGA route to I guess reproduce the chip that way. Most of them do a fine job from the once I have tested or heard. But it's not exactly the same -- but then that might be complete crap on my part and nostalgia-ears making things up or hearing things that are not actually there.
My idea over all was mostly that I seem to recall that as an example MOS technology went defunct about 20ish years or so ago so I don't really know if there are any patent-holders around anymore or anyone that would care. There is a bunch of different re-creations of the SID but they are sort of there but perhaps not always all the way. Also since they are around I am inclined to think there is nobody jealously guarding their patents. If not there should be plenty of chips there to go for to keep say PET:s, C64 and even the Amiga with replacements. The situation might be similar for other machines.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @01:18AM (1 child)
Sign me up!
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday July 07 2020, @02:52PM
Modern chips do not have DIP packaging sadfully.
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @01:34AM (1 child)
One hundred free chips is dandy, but how much will they charge for the fish? And the ale?
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @01:40AM
Maybe that's the catch--you get the 100 dice, but have to attach leads and package them on your own dime?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @01:48AM (14 children)
Just the other days, I needed some op-amps for voltage converters. Can't find no op-amp chips no mo.
Imma fax my design to google right over.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @03:50AM (13 children)
https://www.digikey.com/products/en/integrated-circuits-ics/linear-amplifiers-instrumentation-op-amps-buffer-amps/687?k=&pkeyword=&sv=0&v=505&pv1989=0&sf=0&FV=-8%7C687&quantity=10&ColumnSort=0&page=1&stock=1&pageSize=25 [digikey.com]
Lots of choices. Specs that we would have killed for in the 1970s...
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Tuesday July 07 2020, @04:12AM
Have you seen these? https://www.ebay.com/itm/Dual-Discrete-Op-Amp-HiFi-Audio-Preamp-Operational-Amplifier-OPAMP-replace-ad827/273531975946 [ebay.com]
(Score: 1) by anubi on Tuesday July 07 2020, @10:34AM (11 children)
I still use a lot of LM358.
They have an unusual input stage that will go slightly below zero when run on unipolar 5 volt logic power.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Wednesday July 08 2020, @01:36AM (10 children)
I didn't quite follow- do you mean that you can go below zero volts at the input and you still have linear operation?
If that's what you mean, makes sense because the emitter - base junction drop would be around 0.6. ... [ looks at schematic https://www.onsemi.com/pub/Collateral/LM358-D.PDF [onsemi.com] ... yeah, in fact 2 pn junctions in cascade (Darlington).
But, don't go more than 0.5 or so or you'll draw current through the collector -> base (pn junction) of the input transistor and could fry it unless you limit current.
Don't know if you know, but some op amps infamously will "latch up" if inputs are brought too close to power supply "rails". It's due to the way the silicon layers are done- the whole thing becomes an scr and whammo. I've had to replace some otherwise beautiful low noise INA163 op amps due to the problem.
NE5532 (dual) and NE5534 (single) are great op amps too. Very good low noise, pretty decent output drive capability.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Wednesday July 08 2020, @09:36AM (9 children)
LM358... You saw the schematic. Common mode voltage range includes ground, and a couple of tenths of a volt below. Sometimes that eliminates a lot of biasing circuitry on single supply circuitry. You can still have linear operation with both inputs right around ground. But not much lower.
Like non-inverting amplifiers or comparator usage.
Like you said, some opamps latch up. I try like the Dickens not to use them. Just one errant noise pulse will ruin your project. A latchup is a snake in the grass!
I've never seen an LM358 latchup. If you have, please post how you did it so I don't do the same!
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Wednesday July 08 2020, @04:06PM (8 children)
Yes, good point re: biasing. I've always done, as is very common, a simple resistor divider (with cap) to establish a mid-supply voltage reference. Just to keep out of potential non-linear ranges. Negative feedback / stabilization should take care of that, but in audio especially, well I do a lot in audio, but the point is that negative feedback isn't perfect due to normal circuit propagation delay (causes distortion that "golden ears" people truly do hear). I mean to say, you have to have negative feedback, but don't expect it to perfectly fix dynamic problems because if you're getting into nonlinear operation ranges, it's too late to fix. Feedforward helps, but can't always be done.
I'd heard of "latchup" but had never seen it in person until maybe 10 years ago when I bought an otherwise awesome digital audio sampling interface- Motu 896HD. It uses the aforementioned INA163 which has very low noise, but can latchup. I reverse-engineered the circuit and I see the problem and even designed a fix. I think it's a design failure and things like that are discouraging- dovetails with the (heated) discussion on repairability but I won't go into that now. If I had my way they'd have to fix it. I'm an EE and if I designed something that crappy I'd want to be forced to fix it. Point is- nobody's perfect and I think the world would progress better if we learned from, and fixed mistakes.
Frankly the fact that an op amp can latch up to me is a complete design failure and no such thing should ever have been produced!! Not sure if you know what an SCR is, but it's a 4-layer silicon (or other "semiconductor") device that due to device physics latches itself ON. It's not linear. It can only be turned OFF by removing the electric current, so they're great for AC power control. A "triac" is basically 2 SCRs in parallel- 1 PNPN and 1 NPNP if you will, and they're used quite extensively for AC power control.
Again, AFAIK most op amps don't have the latchup problem- only a few and they should be avoided, or very protected.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by anubi on Thursday July 09 2020, @01:15AM (7 children)
Oh yes, I have used SCR a lot. Mostly in resonant power converters and tap switchers.
100% agree with you... A latchup in a linear amplifier is a serious design flaw and should never have left the factory.
Hence my inquiry as if you ever had a 358 latch on you. I use the 358 a lot in control systems and having one latch on me could have serious consequences, not to mention my reputation.
Also agree the LM358 is not natively a very good high fidelity audio amp. The designers did a trade-off in the output source and sink circuit, running it class B for minimal quiescent current, but with significant crossover distortion as the output switches modes from sink to source and back. This can be minimized by forcing the output stage into a either source or sink mode with a pulldown or pull-up resistor to ground or supply rail. You audiophile guys need ultralinear class A biasing.
You are so right. Although high gain and negative feedback is great for precision instrumentation of relatively static phenomena, it leaves a lot to be desired when time dynamics of the feedback loop come into play. I can easily see you running VHF parts. That's why the old vacuum tube amplifiers sounded so good... The amplifiers all ran class A, very linear, with little to no feedback sans cathode resistors.
The 358 does not source very well and will not make it anywhere near the supply rail unless it's output is pulled up, then for practical purposes it's more like a LM339 comparator. Then the really high fidelity units ran a class AB push-pull output stage. Not power efficient, but sure sounded good!
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 1) by anubi on Thursday July 09 2020, @02:00AM (6 children)
Forgive me, that last sentence got misplaced and was meant for the part on vacuum tubes.
I am doing this on my phone, and I am very apt to make this kind of mistake because of my impatience with the page refresh lag of this thing.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Thursday July 09 2020, @02:22AM (5 children)
It's all good, really good stuff, thanks!
So you're obviously an EE? Sounds like you've done some cool stuff. I haven't gotten to do as much EE as I'd like- fell into mostly system, some software (C, assembler, ...), general IT, systems admin.
"Feedforward" can fix the AB crossover distortion somewhat.
You know, I never thought about the VHF op amp idea. Hmmm. The only real design project I have going is a vacuum-tube preamp. It's been on hold for a couple of years due to higher priority problems.
Again, the NE5532 is a great op amp- you'll like them I promise. :)
As far as I know op amps that can latch up are a known thing. IE, you know which ones have the problem design. So I don't think a 358 can latchup.
Mucho kudos to you- I couldn't do anywhere nearly this much typing on a phone. Maybe with speech-to-text, but I hate talking to things. Well, I talk to things, but not ones that actually listen. :)
(Score: 2, Interesting) by anubi on Thursday July 09 2020, @11:42AM (4 children)
Yup... Old EE. Brought up with vacuum tubes.
Dabbled in damn near everything you would find in the field or lab.
Got to work for an oil company, alongside brilliant geologists, then at an aerospace company.
Things were quite rosy until this thing got out among the executive management crowd. Some called this training "charm school". I had another name for it.
Needless to say, I soon developed an "attitude problem". I can't make a plane fly by signing some paper with the words "responsible engineer" under the line. I have to get my hands dirty to know what I am doing. Not from a cubicle. I usually have to personally build the prototype, just so I can see what I am doing wrong. Very rarely do I nail it on the first attempt. But I iterate pretty fast to the correct design.
I would rather do without than face the ignominy of being forced to build junk. And face the agony of failure of untested designs.
So, now I am a private builder of things.
Most of the stuff I work on is micropower custom Arduino architecture stuff. Like you, assembler and C++. Hardware, software, and any interfaces to the real world. I take a lot of pride in my work, and simply can't stand it to have some management type prodding me to cheapen the design and overlook detail. You know as well as I do: The devil is in the detail. Especially if big stuff is involved.
About all I know of IT is writing simple TCPIP stacks for embedded microcontrollers. Very limited subset.
Just for minimal connectivity on the net and maybe custom protocols that make it through the routers.
IT quickly got do complicated I lost track of how to tame the monster. I just know enough to address and mail postcards. So I can recognize mine, or send some.
I'll look into those NE5532.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2, Informative) by anubi on Thursday July 09 2020, @12:35PM
Oh yes... one for you...LMC662
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by RS3 on Thursday July 09 2020, @03:47PM (2 children)
We're much alike. You write much gooder tho. IT ain't a passion, it's just, well, sometimes for whatever reason I fall into it. I'm pretty good at diagnostics and fixing stuff, and IT being foundational, it gets top priority when something goes wrong.
I've always been a hands-on engineer, although I admit there are times I'd love to have a tech build stuff for me while I do one of my too many other interests in life, then I'll come back and test and tweak.
You'll love this stupidity story: about 1.5 years ago I was trying to troubleshoot a stupid circuit design that had gone into oscillation. Some otherwise smart engineer (or maybe non-engineer) had put a power resistor in series with an LM7815 to lower the 7815's dissipation. 2 MHz or so. And frankly it might have been okay but they didn't filter the output so the 2 MHz was getting into everything and spoiling the soup. It's a bit too long of a backstory, but strong rules prevent me from making any significant changes (huge red-tape). I did sneak some bypass caps in that quieted the singer but I haven't done a formal analysis.
Here's the stupidity part: in experimenting with bypass cap values, I had some small drop-type tantalum caps, maybe 4.7 uF. I held one between my thumb and index finger and poked it onto the live circuit. Well, I must have put it on backwards for an instant and it went CRACK!! and I had a tiny blackened hole in each finger and a good deal of pain for a day or so. I didn't know they were so intolerant or violent! The sacrifices I make fixing bad designs. Harumph!
I hear you re: big companies, cubicles, etc. I don't mind the office/cubicle environment for sw development as long as it's fairly quiet / minimal interruptions.
5523 is a workhorse chip. Thanks for the tip on the Lockheed Martin Corporation 662. :-}
I might be doing some Raspberry Pi programming soon...
(Score: 1) by anubi on Friday July 10 2020, @12:51AM (1 child)
Raspberry Pi, in my estimation, is the future of small run custom embedded. I need to get into that myself, but believe it or not, I find myself swamped by the capabilities of these toy Arduino hobby microcontrollers. Granted I had to make a few changes to the I/O schemes to give me virtually unlimited I/O space via multiplexing schemes.
I hope one day to release my designs with the hope that if they are good enough, they will become a standard design that will continue to be useful long after I am gone. But for now, I am making damn sure I have all the inconsistencies out of it.
I am making them to help out on the farm and truck, as information gatherers, and converting sensor data into common file formats...like .csv files... Without involving huge way overcomplicated systems that require all sorts of terms and conditions.
Lockheed Martin 660. I had to go look that up. I had a dual CMOS opamp in mind. I had used some before and they worked as expected on a laser current stabilizer.
Yup... Sure sounds like we have done a lot of fun stuff. Problem is, I got used to it. The longer I did it, the more things I learned NOT to do, and finally reached the level I could make nearly anything. You sound like you've hit that too, where you just look at a schematic and see the gotchas in it.
You do not receive experience and wisdom until just AFTER you really needed it.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Friday July 10 2020, @01:43AM
Sorry- very nerdy punny "humor"- LMC = Lockheed Martin Corporation. My dad worked there for many years.
I've seen some schematics and thought "wow, these people are brilliant!" But some, yeah, can't believe that ever worked, let alone was produced and shipped.
Truck and farm, that's my language. I'm not a farmer, but my mom's father grew up in the mid-west on huge farms so I've always thought it was in my blood. I like the idea of helping them gather and compile data. This could be a really good thing. I'd love to help- not sure if I could or how...
The aforementioned Pi project is a brand new possible gig. I have to go meet other company principal on Monday, but it should go well. Right now they're using some kind of 3rd-party interface gizmo that looks way overly complicated and expensive, to get a few lines of binary data. It's not necessarily 5V stuff so the guy was worried it would zap the Pi's inputs. I told him I could design a simple interface circuit to "clean up" the signals and protect the Pi. He kind of hesitated. I didn't push for it at all. Not sure if there's a "shield" or "hat" for the Pi to do that, but it's pretty trivial using a perfboard "shield".
I worked for a short time at a tiny company that makes A/D stuff- little single-board converter / mux. Some of them have essentially infinite input impedance. Mostly sells to military and science research labs. The input muxes were off-the-shelf analog switches, like 4066, and the op amps mostly TL084 family. Or maybe it was a MOS input one but off-the-shelf stuff for sure. Had to be CLEANED very very well- scrubbed very carefully, rinsed in very filtered water, and dried under warm lamps.
And they would do DC- they had an internal calibrate cycle to keep them DC "honest".
(Score: 4, Informative) by stormwyrm on Tuesday July 07 2020, @03:03AM (3 children)
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday July 07 2020, @03:19AM (2 children)
Now factor in the maximum die size: 10mm2.
I'm not sure about the Xeon but most of the Northwood [intel.com] products seem to have been based on a 131 mm2 die.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @04:44AM (1 child)
Emulating old systems seems to be the realm of Rpi 4 videos on youtube.
SNES machine that dual boots into a 2GS?
GS/OS would absolutely fly at 1000 times its original clock speed.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday July 07 2020, @05:06AM
RPi 4 just moved to a 28nm node, from 40nm. I'm guessing die size is somewhere between 80 and 100 mm2.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @03:16AM
100 should be enough
(Score: 2) by bart9h on Tuesday July 07 2020, @08:26PM
(obviously I followed the tradition of not reading TFA)