A Little Semiconductor Related History - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: mawyatt
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 13, 2024, 05:36:49 pm
content: As requested, here's a brief tour of way back in our developments of the first silicon fully integrated RF/MW/MMW chip developments. This is open for all sorts of additional information for anyone wanting to contribute.Chapter 1Way back around mid 80s we were always requiring a command channel receiver which needed to be very tiny and powered from various sources including switchers. This set us out on a path to create a fully integrated single chip receiver, and realized that we couldn't use a traditional heterodyne architecture which led us to create a direct-down conversion or zero IF type. We also couldn't use a crystal, as they were much too big, and created a unique receiver architecture which utilized the transmitted signal as the LO by injection locking an on-chip oscillator to the transmitted signal. The injection locking process also allowed direct FSK and ASK demodulation, this architecture was much later patented (long since expired tho).We started looking for a 3/5 semiconductor process that could be used to integrate this receiver, and realized we couldn't integrate all the needed functions and turned to silicon. Many "experts" told us that this was impossible, as IC based silicon wasn't nearly fast enough, didn't have good MW models, no simulators for an entire receiver and so on. Well we didn't listen and developed our own simulators based around core SPICE.When Bell Labs heard about this project they offered up a research developing complementary bipolar process with 9.8GHz NPNs and 4.8GHz PNPs. The models for the bipolars were what we called "Extended Gummel-Poon" and employed extra devices "outside" the core model to handle the MW and other GP limitations. We also needed integrated inductors in silicon, and utilized a thick surface gold metallization with a high resistivity silicon substrate. Later this silicon process became known as CBIC-V2 and was employed by Burr-Brown and many others for their high performance analog devices. Rumor has it that ADI got their high performance complementary bipolar process from AT&T Lucent Bell-Labs, but don't know for sure.The integrated inductors in silicon were also interesting as we needed higher "Qs" than what others (Meyer of Grey & Meyer) were developing in silicon. These were helped by the mentioned which gold metallization and high resistivity substrates, and we developed means to create silicon inductors that gave reasonable "Qs", recall something like ~15 back then. These inductors were done with square spirals (layout tools didn't allow 45 degree angles), and we had experimentally verified that best "Qs" were achieved by not filling the entire square, but just about 40%. This is because the amount of incremental inductance vs resistance and substrate loss decreases as one "closes" the square spiral, thus keep the spiral open for higher "Q" needs.The receiver was developed in this silicon process and had many other unique features including a high performance band-gap reference based LDO that had very high frequency PSRR because we couldn't use any type PS decoupling as these caps were too big (the BG reference was published in the AT&T Lucent Bell Labs Journal). A single off chip small capacitor was required to offset compensate the entire receiver chain, we also had a high value resistor off chip since it didn't effect overall size (located next to cap), could have integrated this but might have had issues with noise and substrate coupling, so decided for off-chip.The on-chip oscillator had a 5 bit DAC to control/trim the frequency, and we also needed to fine tune/trim the oscillator and decided to use a laser and developed a laser trim feature as well.The 1st chip actually worked really well, and we went on to production and developed a means to actively measure the chips utilizing a Flexible Membrane Polyamide probe from Cascade Microtek and also a version which allowed active laser trimming. The idea was to make the probe "look" exactly like the substrate the chip was mounted too, thus the laser tuning would be accurate.Later a customer wanted a flip-chip version of the receiver to reduce the Z axis due the wire bonds, the entire chip and substrate had to be under 1mm!!! We wafer thinned the chips and developed very thin substate, and created bumps on the chip pads by carefully smashing a wire bond onto the pad which created a ball type "bump" which was flipped onto a substrate with conductive epoxy selectively placed on the substrate. This flip chip imposed a problem for active laser trimming the chips after flipping on the substate. We developed a substate with tiny holes to allow the laser to "blindly" trim the flipped chip. This all worked but was very tedious and expensive, so these weren't produced in large amounts.Along with the chip development we worked with Dr Ken Lakin at TFR to develop very thin high performance BAW filters in Aluminum Nitride. Ken was the leading authority in BAW technology and developed the small thin preselect filters for the single chip receiver, we had plans to integrate the BAW filter with the silicon receiver but that never materialized.End of first chapter.Best,

author: mawyatt
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 13, 2024, 05:59:44 pm
content: Chapter 2.As one might imagine we also wanted to integrate a lot of digital signal processing onto the single chip receiver as well as a companion transmitter. Silicon bipolar technology wasn't going to support he level of DSP and Logic, so we needed a CMOS or BiCMOS process that could perform at the speeds/frequencies we needed. IBM was early in the development of SiGe BiCMOS technology and wanted lots of $ to participate, more than we could afford at the time.John Roberts founded SiGe Microsystems and heard about us and came down for a visit, they had licensed IBM UHVD SiGe technology created at Burlington, VT (another fun story). He wanted to license the Silicon receiver technology but management decided against such (another fun story). John mentioned that Maxim had utilized them (SiGe Micro) to help transition the old Tektronix GS2 bipolar process into a SiGe version called GST2.We contacted Maxim and arranged a trip out to Oregon and were met by various Maxim Executives including Robert Shear (VP), we arranged an exchange with our wafer scale active laser trim technology for access to GST2. We were going to develop the Single Chip Transmitter for the Single Chip Receiver, with later minds of integrating both into a SiGe Single Chip Transceiver, and later with on-chip DSP.Our Inital GST2 test chip didn't turn out well, the pinch resistors were way off and lots of other issues prevented us form getting much out of this first test chip. In the meantime IBM became available, so we abandoned GST2 since our ultimate goal was a fully integrated transceiver with DSP, and this would require CMOS and GST2 was just SiGe bipolar.End of Chapter 2.Best,

author: mawyatt
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 13, 2024, 06:56:13 pm
content: Chapter 3.Robert Shear of Maxim wanted an introduction to Dr Ken Lakin atTRFTFR technologies and insisted we fly out. He also insisted a direct flight to Portland and not take the shuttle flight to Bend, Oregon whereTRFTFR was. Robert wanted to pick me up and drive from Portland Courtyard (where I stayed) to Bend, Oregon (TRFTFR Technologies). During the long 2 hour drive Robert asked lots of questions, both technical and otherwise, later I realized that drive was an interview!!!Maxim was interested in acquiringTRFTFR and that's why Robert wanted the introduction.In the meantime we had arranged by lobbying US Congress to supply funds to allow an US agency to "buy down" access to an advanced SiGe BiCMOS process at IBM. This was successful and had early access to the advanced SiGe IBM Processes at Burlington, Vt. Much later this concept of using USG funds to "buy down" access to commercial advanced semiconductor processes for strictly USG use by qualified contractors became the seedling for the Trusted Foundry.With access to SiGe BiCMOS we had the means to create an entire RF/MW/MMW Transceiver with DSP, Logic and Memory on a single chip. During this development we became concerned about digital "corruption" of the sensitive receiver by means of substrate coupling, and developed a substrate isolation technology later jointly patented with IBM. As a backup, since this transceiver was very important for certain customers, we developed a concept to sub-sample the input signal with a ultra-high speed precison sampler, then utilize DSP to recover the signal (we had experience with this subsampling MW signals in ~1980 with a Real Time SA, another fun story). The general idea was to sample the input just before the digital clock edges, since this gave to most time after all the clock edge chaos creates to die down. Our high level resources were completely consumed with the SiGe Transceiver, so we employed Q-Dot in Colorado Springs to develop the high speed precision sampler in IBM SiGe BiCMOS technology. The sampler was based upon a switched emitter follower concept, and later became a product of Hittite which had acquired Q-Dot from Semtech and now ADI.Since the Transceiver was highly successful (after a hiccup with the diode protection on the many on-chip LDOs), we never employed the sampler, however it went on to a successful product by itself as mentioned. The single chip transceiver was produced in a few flavors for various intended usage, and led to the concept of a chip set for the JTRS military radios which created considerable interest in our little research company and eventually led to our acquisition in 2006 (another fun story).Anyway, we've had the fortune to work with some great engineers/scientist over the years and we'll stop here unless folks are interested in the mentioned "other fun stories".If you have addition or informative details related please chime in, this is all from old memory and surely forgot things, or messed them up!!Getting old sucks, but it's better than the alternativeBest,

author: jwet
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: February 14, 2024, 02:23:01 pm
content: That is a fascinating tale. I reported into Robert Shear (through at least one additional level of management) at one point. I'll have to think through mine and respond.

author: jwet
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: February 14, 2024, 03:40:35 pm
content: Ok- Ok, hear is one from here, it taught me how the semi business works... - "How Dallas Became Part of Maxim"Vin Prothro was the founder, CEO and president of Dallas Semi for nearly 20 years. He started working for TI out of school and was part of a group of engineers that left TI to found MOSTEK- this was unusual for TI at the time- no one ever left. MOSTEK was started in the late 60's and had seen explosive growth with semiconductor memory and early LSI around 72-74. This early memory lead was something Intel and others were enjoying before the Japanese swooped in and killed its profitability a few years on. This was also during the calculator and digital watch era as small LSI functions became reachable economically. MOSTEK was right in the middle of all of these trends and were doing well. Prothro rose to CEO of MOSTEK and the company was doing well having weathered the memory and calculator tsunami's as well as a dull late 70's economy. United Technologies, a Connecticut conglomerate, mainly a Jet Engine company was on an M & A tear in the mid 70's. Besides Jet Engines, they did industrial stuff like Otis Elevator, Carrier HVAC and were trying to diversify, a GE Model. They purchased MOSTEK on a whim. They immediately wanted to move everyone to Houston- if you know Texas, Dallas and Houston may be in the same state but are worlds apart. Prothro and a bunch of MOSTEK engineers founded Dallas around 1984 (BTW-about the same time as Maxim started), mainly to get a fresh start, work on some emerging ideas and stay in Dallas. They started with memory but the Japanese soon made this a terrible business. They had sharp applications people, solid design and good fab and manufacturing people. They found some good niches, from the digital watch work at MOSTEK, they were uniquely positioned to do the CMOS clock and battery backed memory used in all PC's. These battery plus IC hybrids lead into a lot of unusual assembly processes- embedding batteries, etc- "Touch Memory" was a surprise success that found niche wins- tracking keys in car dealers and parking meters in Turkey of all places. The PC "ZeroPower" RTC was an awesome business and they had a heavy share. They grew into other segments including Micros and Telecom T1 carrier circuits- with lots of market pull with local telecom companies in the area. In early 2000, without any history of health or heart issues, 58 year old Prothro had a massive, fatal heart attack at a board meeting for a charitable org he sat on. (McDermott). Dallas was devastated. They had no succession plan, Prothro was a wiry and fit, young CEO. The Dallas CFO, Alan Hale, filled in temporarily.A decision was made for a number of reasons that Dallas should be acquired rather than just replacing the CEO. They had been successful but had sort of plateu'd. Since founding in 84, their revenues had risen to $500M vs $2B for Maxim in the same time. The problem was to find a friendly, culturally and technically compatible acquirer. TI certainly had the funds and some interest but would have been a disaster culturally. Maxim was identified early on but our CEO was a bit skeptical. Maxim was an analog integration company with very high margins, high engineering content and was selective about what markets it participated in. It was strong internationally with half of its business being non-US. Dallas was primarily a digital company, had only fair margins but generally had a less disciplined product launch machine. Dallas also used manufacturers reps and did most of its business through distribution. They didn't have a strong handle on their market position and had no international presence. Maxim on the other hand had a direct sales and applications force, did a significant amount of direct sales to large OEM's and had much better market knowledge. The one thing that tipped the scales was Dallas fab capacity and unusual manufacturing capabilities. Maxim was still trying to dig itself out of a deep capacity hole it had dug for itself in the mid 90's. Dallas actually had an overcapacity, it built up for business that never came. If Dallas could be self supporting without dragging down Maxim's margins (accretive), could provide some FAB capacity over time and if the people were flexible enough, it might just work.It was no secret that Dallas was foundering but few knew how badly. If Maxim was going to do something, it had to be fast and secretive. Jack Gifford, before Maxim's founding, was CEO of Intersil after co-founding AMD with Jerry Sanders. He was running Intersil in 1980 when General Electric acquired Intersil. Jack Welch and Jack Gifford weren't a good match- Jack G. quit shortly after and went back to his family roots of farming. He founded a farming company called J Leal Farms that he ran from 1980 to 1984 when Maxim was put together from other ex-Intersil alums. I mention the farm because it comes up later in the story in a humorous context.This is the end of Chapter 1- stay tuned.

author: RoGeorge
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 14, 2024, 04:11:25 pm
content: Wow, thank you!Amazing stories.Subscribed!

author: David Hess
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 15, 2024, 01:54:13 am
content: Quote from: mawyatt on February 13, 2024, 06:56:13 pmI always wondered what Hittite was doing for sampling.

author: schmitt trigger
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 15, 2024, 02:39:47 am
content: The dynamism of the US semiconductor industry, between the 1960s and early 1980s was the World’s absolute highest. Only in the late 1980s did the Japanese companies, with their laser-focus on quality and cost cutting, did they find a worthy adversary.I will be watching this thread for additional updates.

author: jwet
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: February 15, 2024, 05:44:33 pm
content: How Dallas Became Part of MaximChapter Two- Top Secret Due DiligenceIn order for one public company to acquire another, there are a lot of procedures that must be followed to make sure that the shareholders interests are kept in front of mind. It also requires extreme secrecy strategically. If the public gets wind of a sale, its inevitable that the buyer will pay a premium above the market price to entice the acquiree board, etc. Its not unusual to pay 20% over market cap. This was the early days of Sarbanes-Oxley and there was a lot of scrutiny on company shenanigans. In order to preserve shareholder value for Maxim, a complete analysis of what Dallas really was was required. Maxim needed to interview all the VP's, business unit heads, operational heads, financial execs and all the IC designers and senior apps and strategy people. This was about 500 people in total. This all had to be in complete secrecy to preserve the equity of both companies.Gifford went to college on a baseball scholarship at UCLA and still played baseball for the "Maxim Yankees" in a serious adult league in San Jose. Every now and then, I would run across some very buff 30 year old executive in the halls of Maxim- perhaps with a title of sales manager or expediter. With a wink, a senior staffer in the know, would say, "Yankee". Jack was recruiting ex athletes for mid level positions with the understanding that saturday afternoons would be baseball day. These were all sharp, driven people but I found it funny. Jack hired a lot of athletes for business management and junior executive positions. Jack thought in sports terms with high energy and well thought out strategy. This secret due diligence effort was a good example. One afternoon, he took a chartered Lear Jet full of his senior executives down to Dallas to have a look at the place. This was deliberately a little sloppy and overly public. It was even leaked to the press outlets like EE Times and EDN. The group did take meetings in Dallas with senior execs for a couple of days but the real purpose was strategic. On return, the group settled back to work in Sunnyvale. The press was anxious to hear the outcome and rumors swirled. Jack and his team hadn't actually made up their minds, but the public word was that an acquisition didn't make much sense, there wasn't enough synergy, blah, blah, blah. This calmed the gossip mill, but internal deliberations went on. As the main product strategist for standard products, I was given several tasks to analyze product lines, financials, R&D spending and rates of returns of three of 24 of Dallas's business units. There were about ten other senior staffers throughout Maxim that did similar secretive work after the well publicized exec trip. We had about a week to complete a report that was forwarded to Jack's office. All the rumours about any acquisition of Dallas died down. Inquiries were answered with a probable no or a shrug in the rumour mill.Maxim had a lot of remote design centers and just lone remote employees. This was somewhat unique at the time and shows a kind of flexibility of management. I was recruited and hired in San Diego as the Field Applications Manager for the southwest. I had been working in instrumentation development for 12 or so years at General Atomic and SAIC. Good jobs but limiting. I was always curious about working for a chip company and Maxim contacted me on an especially off day- the call came from Dave Fullagar- a founder of Maxim and Sr. VP who ran field applications. If you know semi history, he's also the designer of the legendary 741 at Fairchild in the 60's, the part was defined by none other than Jack Gifford. I was a bit starstruck. I had interviewed with a couple chip companies upon graduation (ironically Intersil) but no offers came. I wanted to be involved in a chip company in the product selection, strategy and business development area. In Maxim, this was called "corporate applications" and it sounded perfect. Unfortunately, there were no openings and its not a job where a guy could come in from outside and be effective- you had to grow up some in the culture. They offered me a job in Field Applications as a regional manager for the southwest, a pretty hot area. From San Diego, I was to meet all Maxim's customers in the southwest, provide FAE support and hire 4 guys to cover San Diego, Los Angeles, Orange County and Phoenix and train them up. Once I had this set up, we could talk about a corporate applications job. Fair enough I thought and went to work. I had completed my hiring and training tasks after 18 months and was ready to talk about the next job. My wife was from Tennessee and never was really wild about the west coast. She put up with San Diego as its kind of heaven but she really wanted to get back to her roots in the southeast somewhere with her toddler family of two for all the normal reasons. I looked around and settled on Raleigh-Durham, NC as a good candidate location. I told Maxim i was NC bound somehow and would love to continue with Maxim if they could accommodate it. We negotiated a remote corporate applications position for standard products where I would also cover the growing RTP Area as an FAE at least temporarily. Similar to San Diego, I would hire and train a replacement and see where it went from there. RTP was covered by a guy based in Florida that had all the southeast, a sizeable chunk of business extending from Fla to DC and west out through Alabama and northwest up to southwestern VA. He was happy for some relief, RTP was about 1/4 or his territory's business but was growing fast- Ericsson Mobile Phones, IBM PC Company/Lenovo and Northern Telecom among many others.What was good in this situation about having senior staffers located remotely from the factory was stealth. There were a couple dozen guys squirreled away that didn't really show up on org charts in a direct way. These people could be tasked to work and even travel for special assignments without anyone knowing. On a friday morning, the CEO's admin, called me and said there was an open return ticket waiting at the counter at RDU for me for that afternoon. Pack for a week- business casual or less- "you'll be a farmer"- flannels and jeans were ok. This was pretty weird, Maxim was a very formal company- engineers wore dress shirts with ties, anyone higher was in a nice suit. We were to check into the Four Seasons Las Collinas Golf Resort- pretty nice digs and be ready for a meeting at 9 pm. There were about 75 people at the evening meeting, mostly remote staffers like me and some senior company muscle, our CEO and a bunch of finance types who I didn't have much contact with. Las Collinas is about a 5 minute drive from Dallas in Farmer's Branch. This Four Seasons would be our remote headquarters to take on the due diligence task. Our cover story was that this was an executive retreat and golf outing for "J Leal Farms". This cracked me up and I would throw random farming words into my public conversations to throw off any spies- "fertilizer!", "tomatoes!" became a private joke for years after.Over the weekend, we thoroughly interviewed 500 identified senior staff, designers and execs of the company. Interviews were generally 30 minutes and key personnel would have three interviews. Dallas employees streamed in and out of the hotel over that weekend. Interviews started at 8am and went until 9 pm. Some interviews lapsed into Monday with follow ups and clarifications. All the interview evaluations were gathered, sorted and presented finally to the CEO on Monday night. Each of us staff were given a single vote on whether we were for or against, I don't think each was weighted evenly but there was an illusion of democracy at least. The CEO and Sr. VP's deliberated privately that night and Tuesday morning drafted a memorandum of understanding that set a nominal purchase price and made our intentions public. There was an a conference call with the investment community and trade press. Later in the afternoon, a huge warehouse was cleared out that could seat about half of the employees. Giant banners that said Maxim/Dallas magically appeared and all the Dallas employees were lead into a presentation in two shifts to hear about the deal and garner support. All the Maxim staff was introduced briefly. I was still in my "farmers clothes", not having the good sense to think ahead and bring some dress clothes. There was a lot of excitement. Afterwards. all the exhausted stealth interviewers and staff disappeared back to their corners and it was over. After such an announcement, there is a quiet period in M&A. I found this unsettling after all the excitement. Many months of travel to Dallas followed as we trained and met with our new Dallas colleagues. Different Dallas groups were put under senior group managers at Maxim. This went smoothly mostly, there were some inevitable, unavoidable overlaps that were handled pretty respectfully and the rest is history.The EndThis was a great experience in my career.

author: David Hess
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 15, 2024, 07:32:16 pm
content: I really hate Dallas embedded battery backed up SRAMs and clocks. They have caused so much trouble when the batteries died, or even ran low. They are even worse than MOSTEK mask ROMs.

author: jwet
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: February 15, 2024, 07:51:28 pm
content: I can't argue much with your comments about the RTC/NVRAM stuff, they were loved by those that bought them but didn't age well. They were not a very sustainable solution. What these parts allowed was to plop a battery backed RTC and RAM into any standard 28 pin DIP JEDEC RAM/ROM socket to bring real time to anything. Epson, I believe made similar JEDEC sized SRAM/RTC's with a replaceable coin cell on top. They weren't near as popular. Dallas carried on these non volatile RAMs up to a 128 Kbytes or more. At the time of the acquisition, EMC made giant very elaborate and expensive RAID arrays where the allocation tables and RAID maps were backed up in a bank of these Dallas NVRAMs. Since they were self protecting and battery backed, they were a nice backup solution for the day. They must have been pretty reliable, EMC made pretty good stuff. This was Dallas's single biggest design win and was worth millions.All of this stuff has to be judged by the technology of the time I think. ROMS and other larger parts of that ERA were notoriously unreliable. This was later found to be sodium contamination in most early CMOS processes and Tin Whiskers that were the bain of early plastic packaging compounds.It always killed me to open some fine expensive piece of test gear that had a Dallas RTC/RAM soldered down that held all the magic numbers and became EWaste after the battery went dead. This disaster has to shared by the system designers.

author: coppice
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 15, 2024, 09:44:04 pm
content: Quote from: mawyatt on February 13, 2024, 06:56:13 pmYeah, that Benjamin Button thing would be really creepy

author: SiliconWizard
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 15, 2024, 11:25:40 pm
content: Quote from: jwet on February 15, 2024, 07:51:28 pmI second that. Pure waste, a great example of bad engineering, and just planned obsolescence ultimately.I know some will (as always) argue that this isn't "planned" obsolesence as the intent was probably not to make it obsolete early, but when you perfectly know that a given implementation is going to fail after a given number of years, and you claim that it wasn't intentional, I'll call you either a liar, or a stupid cow. Pick your tag. It can be the cow if that makes you feel better.

author: jwet
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: February 16, 2024, 01:49:36 pm
content: A little serial eeprom in I2C or SPI versions existed at the same time. A much better solution. Self backed RAM was slightly easier for the system designer because he didn't have to design in some kind of last gasp power holdup to allow a final write for power failures.I think the real lack was thinking ahead to the life cycle of that product and laziness. Life cycle thinking should be part of engineering. Laziness is just part of the human condition.

author: coppice
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 16, 2024, 02:02:17 pm
content: Quote from: jwet on February 16, 2024, 01:49:36 pmThey do think very hard about life cycle, but for a manufacturer life cycle typically means production date to end of warranty.For small amounts of stored data small EEPROMs were not only available in the late 80s, they were already cheap and massive volume. They went into every TV set to store things like the channel information. The life cycle issue there was that if you channel hopped a lot, through the adverts, those EEPROMs could wear out.I saw NVRAM used in a lot of places where an EEPROM would have been a better solution from the cost point of view.

author: mawyatt
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 16, 2024, 04:17:24 pm
content: As requested from # 2(we had experience with this subsampling MW signals in ~1980 with a Real Time SA, another fun story)above, another fun story.Around 1980 we were approached by a USG agency to develop a handheld battery powered MW RTSA that had been attempted and failed by two very well known and respected west coast technology companies. We were approached because of our advanced DSP in communications (High thru-put modems) capability and company in-house custom CCD technology which was needed for the custom CCD devices in a Chirp Z Transform based RTSA architecture.How could a couple of redneck Florida guys do what the esteemed High Tek California Folks had failed at, not once but twiceThe architecture was unique, employing the little known Chirp Z Transform rather than popular FFT approach to Real Time Spectral Analysis. For the CZT Sine and Cosine convolution we utilize a pair of very long custom CCD devices. These devices require a large voltage swing on 4 clocks to shift the charge down the convolvers, this alone would consume more power than was practical for a handheld device. One of the earlier attempts by one of big Califfornia companies utilized and patented a unique stepped transformer approach to reduce this CCD clock power, and not wanting to "Piss off the Wookie" we wanted to stay away from using such.Realizing the charge stored in the CCD clocks was in the gate oxides and could be "redirected" and stored elsewhere to be used again, we are talking about many 1000s of picofarads for each clock and they needed to be driven to over 15 volts and often (high clock rate)!!! Do the math this was a big power drain just on the single Sine or Cosine CCD convolver and we ended up using 16 & 32 pairs in the final rendition!!We came up with a technique we called Reactive Clock, where the clock charge was alternately stored in anonoff chip capacitor and reapplied. For this to work the CCD clock edge voltage followed a offset sine wave path from ground to clock peak, this was actually preferred for the CCD devices and improved their Charge Transfer Efficiency. A small switched inductor provide the means for this to work and was arranged in a fashion where the output voltage clock peak would double from 7.5 volts to 15 volts. So the clock would swing up to 15V from ground on the rise, be held at 15V, then switch down to zero on the fall and be clamped to ground, this would complete a clock cycle, with each transition when the inductor current was 0. The energy lost in the technique would be dominated by the NMOS switch and inductor loss, and could be managed. We ended up saving ~98% of the power lost in a conventional clock driver.Fast forward to a lab test we were doing and with everything hooked up and running with 5 power supplies, 4 Tek Scopes and our custom AWG, a couple SA all running, we accidentally knocked off a clip lead to the 7.5V powering the Reactive Clocks. When reattaching the lead we noticed everything was still working without the 7.5V power, and the overall power was slightly lower without the 7.5V connectedHow could this be possible?? Turns out what we had accidentally discovered was this unique Reactive Clock circuit would self servo to the lowest possible energy state without help!! Even compensating for CCD capacitance, inductance, switch variation, even temperature!! We should have patented this but didn't fearing the "Wookie might wake up"!! Much later we were allowed to publish so sent this circuit into Electronic Design (could be EDN can't remember) and Mr. Small was the editor, he said Bob Pease review it and said it would not work. We replied with a challenge to Bob, wagering a weeks of our salary vs. a day of his (he made way more than we did!!), and request he study the design a little more and maybe even breadboard it. Well it got published, and you can probably find it under Reactive Clock DriverEdit: Here's a link.https://www.eevblog.com/forum/projects/reactive-clock-driver-circuit/Now back to the CCD devices themselves, they were in a special MOS process that was tailored for CCD imager use but also optimal for convolvers. These were very long thin rectangular chips, way more than usually allowed for normal yields, and had a very large number of "taps". These "taps" were not the usual types but had special use for unique waveforms of interest which we can't discuss, but can say they are unique in they convey the impulse response of the convolver filter characteristics.We'll stop here, and continue if folks are still interested.Best,

author: coppice
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 16, 2024, 04:22:59 pm
content: Quote from: mawyatt on February 16, 2024, 04:17:24 pmWere SAW convolvers ever considered for that project? They were all the rage in 1980.

author: mawyatt
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 16, 2024, 04:32:18 pm
content: Quote from: coppice on February 16, 2024, 04:22:59 pmGood question!!These were very long convolvers, and SAW devices didn't have the equivalent Charge Transfer Efficiency we achieved with our CCDs, so with a SAW device the signal would likely have been severely attenuated . We were looking at just leaving a few electrons behind in each transfer with the CCDs, and the CTE was something like ~0.9999995 or better.Best,

author: T3sl4co1l
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 16, 2024, 05:30:12 pm
content: Quote from: mawyatt on February 16, 2024, 04:17:24 pmYou made a rail splitter with extra steps, so what?Unless I'm misunderstanding the complexity of the situation, or it's just that no one else did at the time (that is, understand it, at a glance, on a sufficiently reduced enough level to see this particular kernel of truth)?Either way, fun indeed.It's kind of a shame that power transistors can't do this -- with gate drive, that is; I'd "invented" the same scheme myself years ago, but it doesn't work because internal R_G is too large to get any meaningful savings at reasonable switching speeds. Unless you're going to drop Fsw massively (<10kHz?), which just isn't going to cut it for most any kind of power conversion application.Not that transistor prices were ever low enough for that to be a practical route, anyway. At least, you'd need a damn serious efficiency-per-buck requirement to have to do it. And at that, with planar MOSFETs at the time (late 2000s) -- that is, requiring stonking massive dies for any kind of performance at high voltages, say for industrial gear. Or to be a bit more concrete about it: say you needed to do synchronous rectification at 600VDC, at what point does your control power match/exceed conduction losses? Then and only then, would you apply the resonant gate drive, and reap a little bit of savings.Now that SJ are thoroughly dominant, performance is very nominal in all voltage ranges, and still continuing to improve from year to year besides; so the lossless gate drive idea is more irrelevant than ever, for power electronics anyway.Ironically, SJ have their own unique loss mechanism, that limits output efficiency regardless of drive. The thing with old planar is, on account of the ~quadratic voltage scaling limitation, you needed huge chips to do much power at efficiency, and lost relatively a lot as control power; well, SJ kind of does the same thing but on the output side (the SJ structure kind of looks like Coss dielectric loss, though it's a bit more interesting than that). It's almost tempting to want planar parts again, to get high output efficiency in resonant applications; but the drive power, and general awkwardness of switching a transistor of some ~nF (big startup transients, or if timing briefly gets out of step), brings one back to reality.Although that said, GaN often have quite low R_G, and I suppose given the small size, one might have a strict enough efficiency and size requirement, in a relatively unlimited budget (though, if that's aerospace: qualifications of those new-fangled GaN chips is going to be another matter), that it could pop up again.RF transistors necessarily have quite low R_G, but they're never made in large enough junctions to get reasonable conduction loss in switching; or, not without paying truly exorbitant prices, say a handful of 1kW amplifiers just to switch a couple 100W. Different fish kettles.But doing that on your own chip, indeed the charge conservation and resistive losses can be optimized quite well.Tim

author: mawyatt
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 16, 2024, 05:56:56 pm
content: Quote from: T3sl4co1l on February 16, 2024, 05:30:12 pmNot exactly a rail splitter, but more of a rail creator since the Reactive Clock actually created the 7.5V supply and did so that it self servoed the lowest possible energy dissipation state compensating for variations timing, CCD capacitance, switches, inductance, temp, aging and so on. We could even use power from the 7.5V (and did) without affecting the overall Reactive Clock efficiency, since this stolen power was just another system parameter the Reactive Clock would compensate for, seeing it as just another inductor or switch loss.Yeah it was so simple in operation at the time it totally eluded and fooled Bob PeaseQuoteA decade later NASA patented a Power MOS Gate Driver based upon this Reactive Clock concept, we could have challenged the patent and shown "prior art" but decided not to pursue such since NASA was a major client of our companyBest,

author: mawyatt
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 16, 2024, 06:11:26 pm
content: Quote from: T3sl4co1l on February 16, 2024, 05:30:12 pmBTW in the 80s Honeywell developed a GaAs CMOS (another fun story) process, intended for Rad Hard applications. They also used the NMOS GaAs as switching devices for 1KW (5V at 200A) switchers for aerospace use and based upon GE's newly developed planar inductors, recall these ran at 200MHz. The general idea was to displace the usual 5V routing and place small 28V to 5V switchers at each load node, rather than a massive central power supply that distributed the 5V, analysis showed a significant overall system weight savings!Mike

author: David Hess
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 16, 2024, 07:28:41 pm
content: Another problem with the Dallas backed up SRAMs is when the internal battery was exhausted, all access was lost even when powered, so it would not work even as a SRAM, which was fatal to most systems. I had some motherboards that I really liked that used them, and when access was lost they would no longer boot at all. I could not even repair them because the heavy copper in the 6 layer boards made even a through-hole DIP package too difficult to remove.Quote from: jwet on February 16, 2024, 01:49:36 pmSupervisor chips to write protect and backup a standard SRAM chip existed from Dallas and others, and the circuit to do it did not take many HCMOS gates.My solution was to use Autostor SRAMs from Cypress Semiconductor as drop in replacements, but they are mostly discontinued now.

author: jwet
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: February 16, 2024, 07:43:24 pm
content: Mike Wyatt-I'll let you finish this tale and think of something else worth talking about, I hope. You've got more technical stories than I do. I was on the Apps and Strategy side working side by side with designers and business management to create new businesses. Good stuff.

author: RoGeorge
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 16, 2024, 08:28:35 pm
content: Quote from: mawyatt on February 16, 2024, 04:17:24 pmIt's a delight to read such stories, please keep them coming.

author: mawyatt
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 17, 2024, 01:22:30 am
content: Ok, continuing from #17 above.Another obstacle we encountered during development of the CZT RTSA was a means to sum a bunch of complex and fast Discrete Time Continuous Amplitude (DTCA) signals with high dynamic range. Conventional voltage feedback summing amplifiers were way too power hungry, and since the inverting summing junction is high impedance and only forced to low impedance by negative feedback which limited the ability to accurately sum signals as this required a "virtual ground" to sum properly at higher frequencies, we decide to start off with a low impedance inverting input, then let negative feedback drive it even lower!! This would come to be known a current mode feedback (maybe already was, but this was 1980), and we employed a current mode summing amplifier, first in bipolar then CMOS, we called "Summing Nodes", that consumed less than 10% of the equivalent voltage feedback methods to do the equivalent summing.A second obstacle was how to test this CZT RTSA, the customer wanted to use NPR (Noise Power Ratio) as one test metric. The available instruments at the time employed fixed switchable high quality crystal filters for the "notch" and amplified broadband noise sources for the "baseline", then Up and/or Down converted into the desired frequency band. These were extremely expensive and custom built at the time, beyond our incremental limited budget. So we came up with what could be called an Arbitrary Waveform Generator (AWG) which employed the fastest hybrid ECL 16 bit DACs available, a massive array of fast ECL Static RAM and a custom interface to the Apple II computer just introduced. The Apple was programmed in Basic to perform an Inverse Fourier Transform where the desired spectral waveform was drawn on the graphics screen, then transformed into the Time Domain coefficients and loaded into static RAM, which then ping-ponged the two DACs which had the outputs summed. The clock for the RAM & DACs were created with a high speed ECL programmable synthesizer clock generator. Also another higher frequency RF/MW/MMW generator was used to UP Convert the DAC outputs to whatever frequency band was of interest.This concept worked beautifully except the conventional Spectrum Analyzers we had at the time had difficulty with some waveforms and we suspected (correctly) due to the discrete time waveform nature, so we set out to develop the sister to the AWG a Discrete Time Spectrum Analyzer based upon the highest speed 16 bit ADC hybrid available, another Apple II and more fast RAM and so on, then did conventional synchronized FFT analysis as required. This became critical, as did the AWG, pieces of custom test equipment for developement.After all this we were able to create arbitrary spectral "waveforms" across large frequency spans in RF/MW/MMW ranges with excellent signal fidelity, enabling the mentioned NPR metrics to be gathered, as well as some very special "waveforms" we can't mention.We delivered a handheld (size of a typical textbook) RTSA capable of spanning RF/MW/MMW frequencies that consumed under 4 watts battery power and had the equivalent computing power a third Cray 1 at the timeThis opened the door and put us on the map in a very specialized community and we went on to many endeavors, many of which we can't discuss, but a few tidbits maybe we can discuss if interested, one of which was the first capacitance ratio ultra-low power SAR floating point ADC, but don't want to hog all the bandwidth!Best

author: mawyatt
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 17, 2024, 02:09:32 am
content: Per RoGeorge request above.While jotting the above down we remembered a unique ADC developed. The RTSA customer wanted to develop a ultra-low power ADC for remote battery powered use. After our success with the RTSA they asked us to develop a low power voltage reference in CMOS for eventual use with the mentioned ADC development.We had a group working on the first capacitive ratio DACs in a custom CMOS at the time and westoleborrowed their DAC design, then created a low power CMOS comparator and used a newly developed Sub-Threshold CMOS Logic Family to create the Successive Approximation Register.We put all this on a custom test chip along with a custom CMOS voltage reference as all breakout devices (circuits not internally connected). Later we had a meeting up north at company headquarters and the test chip just came out of fab, we loaded a couple test chips in out briefcase and headed home on a late Friday flight. Over weekend at home we put the test chips (mounted in a 40 pin open package) into a white jumper board and decided to wire up an entire ADC with the individual circuits (they were all pinned out). We had a few pieces of test equipment and verified it actually worked!!Turns out we had a customer meeting starting at 1pm Monday, and blew them away when we demonstrated a fully operational ADC in the labs when they arrived. Later this would evolve into a very unique ADC that had an on-chip low noise preamp/PGA, ranging logic, clock generator and special active bias network for Electret devices. The output was a 8 bit mantissa (2's complement) and 3 bit exponent (~15dB per bit) and had equivalent power consumption of 50K resistor. This led to the development of dual "stereo" versions, and a much more complex chip employing and advanced human voice detection algorithm that was processed in Orbit Semiconductor CMOS.Also created interest with Analog Drives as they wanted to license the ADC technology, but like with the Single Chip Silicon MW/MMW Receiver, management decided against such (another not so fun story).Anyway, at this point we had various customers (word got around quickly about the rednecks in Florida that made chips & stuff that actually worked!!) in line waiting and management tried unsuccessfully to fill our group with additional bodies which we resisted using various techniques including special "tickets" required to work on certain projects.More on this if interested.Best,

author: jwet
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: February 17, 2024, 03:06:39 pm
content: Ok, here is my next installment- as I said, I was a strategic apps guy that worked at the intersection of invention, business and designIC Econ 101 Chapter 1- "How Profitable IC's Get Made"There are several things about the IC business that make it awesome and very profitable. I'll walk through how the economics work in the IC business, especially the analog IC business which I'm most familiar- I was a system level designer and manager before Maxim and this was quite eye opening to me. There are three key components that need to come together in almost equal measure to make profitable IC's. I thought in terms of the abbreviation "DMF", I had a formal scoring system for this but I'm getting ahead of myself. The three letters are Definition, Market and Feasibility. These vectors are the responsibility of respectively Applications, Business and Design. These three business functions have to work well to create profitable, manufacturable designs that customers will buy. I think they are of equal importance. Here are a few details of each. You can think of this as one of those virtuous circles that you see on power point slides of processes. It is a circle that rotates around until all are resolved positively. In a future chapter, I'll get more into raw economics if you're interested that routinely gives you margins of 80% aggregated over a product line with stars and dogs mixed in. I think it's fascinating, you let me know if you want more.Getting from a scrap of an idea to a shipping, profitable IC- "DMF"+++Definition- Questions/Issues for Application to resolve primarilyWhat is it? What is the problem? What are the alternatives? What is done today? What could a solution to this problem look like? What is it worth to a customer? How many customers have the problem? Is it temporary or permanent? Does it lead elsewhere or is just a single point? An example from about 1993, customers designing with the new Pentium CPU's (P54C) couldn't just use a fixed Vcc like 3.3v as the 486 had. Due to process variations and other vagaries, they needed a special and precise Vcc voltages of 3.45 or 3.55, two versions. We joked that they had a big knob at the end of the production line for Pentiums that they turned to be difficult. Of course, this was because we didn't understand Intel's agony and desperation having to produce the part this way. It wasn't initially known whether this was just to be a fixed voltage printed on the CPU, if the voltages would proliferate, what would be the range and resolution of the voltages, would they require dynamic adjustment, etc, etc. We just saw our customers struggling with our standard CPU power point of load solution (MAX767) and our FAE's told us about it. I was the FAE at the time- the customer was AST in Irvine. In a different time, this might have been solved with a potentiometer but this would be pretty barbaric and prone to real field issues should some overzealous customer with a little screwdriver get wind. All of these are definition questions that a good apps guy has to run down. Intel is a big company with big FAT NDA's and super secret internal specs. They had sort of foisted this problem on their customers. The resolution of this potential new product idea was to make three versions of the MAX767, the plain version 3.3v, the R suffix 3.45v and the S suffix 3.55v. You can see these on the data sheet to this day. This cleaned up the current mess, got our customers moving, gave us a competitive advantage and could be done in a few months- only having to modify the feedback dividers on these existing IC's. These parts are laser trimmed and it might have only required a trim software change to effect the change- I can't remember- these were designer issues- later. It was what the customer wanted and no more, that he could afford, that he would buy etc. It would have a short happy life until Intel came up with something better. The something better was a pretty elaborate scheme called "VRM" that unfolded over the next 5 years where the CPU would output a code that told the power supply what voltage to produce. This got very elaborate and Maxim followed all the hills and valleys, signed all the secret squirrel NDA's at Intel, got future road maps and followed along. This simple definition formed the original resolution as just the R and S suffix parts to meet the need. (later more letters were added before it got crazy with VRM,etc) All the overclocking and Vcc tweaking that you can now do from the PC Bios stemmed from this.+++Market- Questions/Issues for Business Management to resolve primarilyEach product line or market segment in an IC company is managed by a business manager. He is like a general manager or CEO of his part of the operation and has P & L responsibility- its a great job for someone who is comfortable juggling a lot of balls. Jack Gifford liked to hire young, aggressive ex-athletes (any sport) with an MBA at least or most ideally an EE degree and an MBA in these central roles. The athletic background was most important, some of our most successful BM's had only a liberal arts degree at least initially. Overall this is where the rubber meets the road. The BM sets pricing, responds to high volume quotes, writes forecast that ultimately get turned into wafer starts in the fab, keeps tabs on deliveries and visits key customers often with sales, apps and occasionally even design to get a feel for his markets. Business managers are the "adults in the room". Apps guys are generally talkers and get excited about new things and customer inputs. They can see the beauty in some applications and often don't see that they're bad businesses- meaning small. A small example; A lot of FAE's are musicians, I've never figured out exactly why. If they ever go into a customer making sound mixing consoles, they fall in love and send all kinds of reports and proposals back of the incredible opportunity in these consoles. Tons of ADC's, DACs, Amplifiers, attenuators, analog switches, low noise power supplies, etc. They can't seem to reason out that this is not a great business though it is a lot of fun- the volumes just aren't there for a primary target. IC's don't start making money until you get to millions- this is a big number. A lot of FAE's, also have a limited view of the world- this was sort of meme in the company evaluating inputs from the field. If you asked our Italian FAE what the biggest world wide application for precision analog was, he would say without hesitation- "espresso machines". He had 5 customers in Milan that each made thousands of very elaborate espresso machines. The expanded world market must be incredible- I'm not picking on Italians, every locale has these kind of biases. Business management has to see through all this, get some realistic numbers together, get some kind of die size estimate, yield, product lifetime, average selling price, design time, etc and put together a mini business plan. Some parts of this planning, I won't divulge, I would still consider them Maxim trade secrets- this is absolutely key to the business of making IC's. "Don't Launch Dogs" and if you do, "Kill them While They're Puppies" was a kind of harsh way of putting it but separates profitable companies from losers and zombies. In the P54C power supply above, this was reasonably straightforward especially if a contact inside Intel could give you a little glimpse of their road maps. All this is possible, if you sign enough papers and get a lawyer or two in the loop. Resolving this market piece in other cases can be tough. Not getting swayed by sloppy process is the key. The business manager with the apps guys usually makes a presentation to a higher manager for launch authority based on the business case. A BM may only get three design launches per quarter and has to choose wisely. His boss is also trying to maintain profitability. One of the difficulties is that the true story on profitability might not be known for a couple of years. Are we still in the window, etc.?+++Feasibility- Questions/Issues for IC Design to resolve primarilyFinally we come to design, a high visibility portion that is really integral to the process but is still part of a process. IC designers though are the rarest and in my opinion most valuable element in this triad- their time shouldn't be wasted with apps or business issues for the most part. He should be handed a completed spec for the overall requirement that he can work with- this Initial Objective Spec (IOS) is usually a joint product of apps and design. Its variable how this work is split up, in my experience, apps develops the first half of the IOS, the "why" and "what" stuff that would conclude with a data sheet and a bunch of notes, business management adds a section about profitability from a market size, yield, die size and design time estimate, etc, etc. You can sense some recursion here. There tend to be a number of iterative loops to create the IOS- some look at this process like a funnel with the final output as the IOS. Design's job is to get happy with this final package along with the whole team, iterate his own estimates with the BM, iterate on specs with apps and finally get to how the problem should be solved. This creates the case that goes to upper management for launch authority. In our MAX767 example, it was clear that timing was key to this whole problem. There were alternatives but a good fast solution would be welcomed. There were hints too that there would be future work and refinements and getting in the game with a solution quickly was most important. Design figured out that by just changing the trim algorithm, they could get a significant yield of "R" and "S" suffix parts without touching the die initially. If the need continued or changed, design could get involved tweaking or doing a complete redesign but in the meantime, the customer was on his way, we were running parts and making money.+++Conclusion-I found this structured process fascinating. The people in the company had grown up with it and didn't see it for all its beauty. It was in a tribal knowledge state when I arrived, all the founders and early engineers knew it but it wasn't scalable. I spent a lot of time formalizing and documenting the process so that we could grow and hire and train.I won't say what the final percentage of dogs to stars was if this process was followed, I consider it a trade secret too. It wasn't bad and made some pretty exciting stock growth through the 90's (4000% IIRC!)More to follow if you're interested. Let me know if there is one piece you're more interested in.

author: mawyatt
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 17, 2024, 03:32:37 pm
content: Very interesting, please continue.Remember when we were briefed 2002~3 on the new IBM advanced processor chip to be used in the Playstation 3 called Cell. Recall it ran on ~1.1V at 90 amps and had a unique code to each chip to program the power supply to the exact proper supply voltages. The Cell had a Power PC Core with 8 surrounding Numeric Processors used for rendering, the Power PC core did nothing but delegate work to the 8 Numeric Processors!!IBM was paranoid about ITAR restrictions since the Cell was the most powerful computing chip available, and could be utilized for "other" uses (another fun story).Best,

author: jwet
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: February 17, 2024, 03:44:30 pm
content: Pretty wild, it all stated with these tweaked Pentium on a .6 micron process! As the process nodes shrunk, it got crazy- evolving into this "VRM" as its called now. The CPU core voltage is varied under digital control, DRAM voltages are tweaked, etc. There were some clever techniques like "voltage positioning" where the voltage of Vcc rail point of load could be set a bit high but have a programmable output impedance- at light loads, it would be at higher voltage, usually meaning lower clock frequencies and current draw and it would draw down in a semi open loop fashion. I lost track of all the clever innovations long ago- it became a commodity covered by guys like Richtek and Intersil/Renesas- we gracefully exited as the margins went to zero- our model though we didn't discontinue any part numbers- you can still buy a MAX767 to this day. If you asked for a million piece quote Maxim would not be competitive by design We probably could have stuck it out a bit more but the high volume desktop market was played out. Since you only have so many designers, these designs didn't get to the top of the profitability ranking of possible launches- more of the above processes. There was a lot of action and engineering required to make high performanace laptops. Maxim did make some 4 phase 100 amp bucks for some of this crazy stuff later- though this was just testing the market. The IBM mainframe group (Z series) in NY had insane requirements - hundreds of amps that we looked at. We also started a digital power to address some of this- a decent story in itself.

author: mawyatt
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 17, 2024, 04:00:35 pm
content: Yeah, and you can put an entire Pentium Processor under one 100 micron bond pad with today's leading nodes!!Because the Cell was so powerful, orders of magnitude more than anything at the time, but required very specialized compliers to utilize the full potential. Recall that the best commercially available compliers used by the best gamers could use 4~5 of the Numeric Processors.Rumor has it some veryspecialusers got access to all 8 processors with custom compliers and had massive arrays of Cells, like an entire building hosting over a million Cells....yes that's over 90 Megawatts of power required just to power the Cells and a dedicated Sub-Station/Power Plant next to the Cell Hosting buildingOne would call this the Ultimate Server FarmBest,

author: iMo
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 17, 2024, 04:44:21 pm
content: Quote from: mawyatt on February 17, 2024, 04:00:35 pmWhat kind of game they ran?

author: themadhippy
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 17, 2024, 04:54:32 pm
content: Quotedoom of course.

author: coppice
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 17, 2024, 05:33:43 pm
content: Quote from: mawyatt on February 17, 2024, 04:00:35 pmSpecialist compilers were not the problem. Making Cell programs fly required specialised people. Those are hard to scale up. All highly parallel solutions to date, and maybe inherently, are very demanding of the people doing their programming.

author: mawyatt
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 17, 2024, 05:49:38 pm
content: Quote from: iMo on February 17, 2024, 04:44:21 pmReal Life and Death!! Or as mentioned Doom in real life!!!

author: mawyatt
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 17, 2024, 05:53:17 pm
content: Quote from: coppice on February 17, 2024, 05:33:43 pmExactly, and these "specialized people" were the Best of the BestBest,

author: iMo
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 17, 2024, 05:56:51 pm
content: Quote from: mawyatt on February 17, 2024, 05:49:38 pmWhile looking at today's state of the world order perhaps an elderly lady played solitaire on it..

author: harerod
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: February 17, 2024, 07:33:23 pm
content: mawyatt, jwet, let me take this opportunity to thank you for sharing your stories.+ + +I wonder if you could share a story how the DS18x20 1-wire thermometer came into existence. I have been using that chip for a really long time, loving the simplicity of the hardware interface, cursing during the first firmware implementation in PIC16 assembly. I understand that this device came from Dallas and may may been below your pay grade.+ + +Quote from: jwet on February 17, 2024, 03:06:39 pmI fully understand the reason behind this quote. However, doing tiny scale projects, which will see less than a hundred units over a couple of decades' lifetime AND clients who will never stock up on parts, this is what makes us small fry designers wary towards certain manufacturers. I try to explain to clients that we are not the target business of the semiconductor manufacturers, but rather bottom feeders, who gnaw on the leftovers. (not much to gnaw on, during Chipageddon)Whenever somebody complains about yet another new entry into, say, an MCU-family, I just assume that some automotive company had a requirement for exactly that feature set.Having said that, we also see a difference between manufacturers. Some kill products left and right. Others provide a pin and firmware compatible migration path. Something worthwhile to watch out for.

author: coppice
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 17, 2024, 07:57:03 pm
content: Quote from: harerod on February 17, 2024, 07:33:23 pmA lot of engineers think MCUs are general purpose. A few are, but the vast majority are tailored for one specific use - either a specific lead customer, or an upcoming key application that existing parts don't suit. They may merge several requirements on a single die, and fuse them into a bunch of application specific SKUs, as developing a new die is currently expensive. I remember when the opposite was true, and people would spin slightly tailored dies for any reasonably large customer. Now mask set costs have radically changed that practice. If you know an application well, you'll usually recognise the MCUs that were developed for it, from a quick scan of their data sheet. Of course, if the part can be applied to some other applications that's a very welcome bonus for the vendor, but its just that - a bonus.

author: jwet
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: February 18, 2024, 12:49:45 am
content: I happen to know the story of the temp sensors and one wire- its not bad, it certainly wasn't below my pay grade but a little bit before we acquired Dallas- these parts existed. I had a later function during the end of my tenure working for the CTO where we were tasked to be involved in different business units to sort of tear down silos that get formed in big companies over time. One of my favorite assignments was the 1 wire group managed by Hal Kurkowski. I love that line- I can give you some flavor if you give me a couple of days. I may have touch base with some old Dallas guys for a better picture of the early history. I know the market landscape pretty well and its interesting. Its one of the only businesses that I ever analyzed that had a negative rate of return on apps time- the more you tried to study the market, the worse the return was. Analog switches have a similar perverse nature for different reasons. 1 wire will be fun- give me a few days.Most chip companies think of Whales, Fish and Minnows. Minnows are 100k/year- many customers are in this class, I never was. Maxim usually thought in terms of "long tails" as in a statistical distribution sense- I think the curve would be e^-kx. Giant large numbers at low x values continuing to go out forever. There is still a fair amount of area in those long tails. We never set out to hurt anyone with our delivery performance, it was just our sin. Some people make bad parts, Maxim was never accused of this.Lots of things are customs and most standard products have custom variants that you've never heard of. When you get to a few million unit buys or long contracts, you get what you want.Also, we might have a single die type that could produce 300 different external part nos. Maxim was good at keeping track of all these so called "metal options" where wafers could be held at final metal and customised as needed for orders- like masked rom. The other thing is a lot of parts can start out as a quick time to market part and later refeined or redesigned to optimize cost, etc. Microcontroller guys do this a lot and sell fatter parts and cost optimize or just eat a little margin depending on the rate of return. Its a pretty complicated bunch of production planning that goes on.Mask sets for really small processes are tens of millions, yes, but the vast majority of non CPU, Memory or FPGA IC's are on 200 nm or more processes where the masks aren't terrible- hundred thousand maybe. The ASML DEUV stuff is fairly rare but gets a lot of press.

author: harerod
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: February 18, 2024, 02:15:27 pm
content: jwet, I will stay tuned.Speaking of minnows - I have been in the small fry category my whole life.At the beginning of my career I did control systems for big machinery. The electrics budget was about DM60k, compared to a DM1Meg unit cost. Sales about 50 units per year. The lab equipment market is somewhat worse, maybe €600 electrics for a €100k machine. About 200..400 units per year.Same goes for the medical diagnostics equipment market, unless you are GE or Siemens and roll your own silicon.Still, I like consulting for small companies and designing stuff around the silicon the big guys hand down for us to play with.

author: jwet
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: February 20, 2024, 01:08:28 pm
content: harerod- I was a relative small fry too before Maxim- did probably 20% that was over 10 k/yr out of dozens of projects. Maxim and other chip companies make high volume stuff so easy to design that its a matter of PCB design and firmware for those guys. In lower volume design, you're on your own and it makes you a better designer by far. I enjoyed meeting with lower volume designers in industrial, etc. In some cases, the chip companies make low volume design easier if the market is very splintered and the business hasn't consolidated. Industrial data acquisition, motor control and a few other markets have this quality- most of the end products are low volume themselves but there is enough repetition and similarities that the aggregated volumes allow IC company to service it. This was most of my career in what Maxim called "standard products" and some integration and designer ease could be had.One of my later assignments was starting an automotive group at Maxim- first as a CEO directed long term study and later as the apps lead hiring the apps people and lining up the first 100 parts. Automotive designers are the worst in this respect, they expect custom for everything and usually have the volumes to get it. The purchasing side of Automotive is arrogant and demanding- I've had purchasers ask what our wafer cost was and how many die per wafer, they wanted to buy chips by the "micro-acre"; completely commoditizing the whole business and ruining any chance of a good business relationship. I think chippageddon was a wake up call for those guys- I was retired by then but I secretly reveled a bit in their pain.

author: coppice
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 20, 2024, 01:23:57 pm
content: My early career was in low volume high value stuff. I found this very frustrating. After putting serious effort into a very polished design, seeing only small numbers made was a real let down. There is a fully justified culture in small volume work that you can't afford the hours needed to make it as polished as you might like. I consciously moved to high volume work for greater job satisfaction. Some high volume environments still don't encourage polished designs, but the good ones really do. A polished design is both easier to sell in high volume, and leads to smaller ongoing support costs. For a while I was trying to find that first design to hit a million units, and have a factory visit to watch them rolling off the line. In the meantime I did some telecoms things which hit hundreds of k, and developed service software which served a huge customer pool, even if only a handful of systems were using my stuff. Finally I hit that million unit product design, and they flowed after that.

author: jwet
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: February 20, 2024, 01:58:06 pm
content: My highest volume design that I did was some car alarm stuff I did as a moonlighting consultant to make a little extra money. These were very unpolished things that sold in low hundreds of K's. I wasn't crazy about it, kind of junky, my customer was happy but it was a cut throat business with thin margins and lots of layers of markup to get ot the installers/car dealers.

author: coppice
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 20, 2024, 02:48:19 pm
content: Quote from: jwet on February 20, 2024, 01:58:06 pm100s of k is OK. That's quite satisfying. Its amazing how many things go high volume unexpectedly, are highly unoptimised, and nobody wants to go back and make low hanging fruit improvements to increase the margin.

author: jwet
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: February 20, 2024, 03:27:19 pm
content: Maxim has lot of customers that can do upwards of a million units per week! I've worked with our customers on these designs- the guys that do it routinely at Samsung, Google etc are systematic but don't get immobilized by fear. San Diego had several Set Top box makers for satellite and cable TV- the volumes were crazy, my customers were most concerned about reliability and robustness. They would throw a few cents at problems to make things more robust- things like brown out circuits and supervisors sold to these guys, prices were pretty low- 15 cents perhaps for something that sold for $1.50 at disti. Maxim did a lot with phones, especially Samsung. I wasn't involved in this and didn't want to be. Very quick turn custom power ASIC's with 4 little bucks, 10 linears and a bunch of logic. The lifetimes from launch to death was 6 months- the design life a phone model. Samsung eventually brought these ASIC's in house and made flaming phones for a bit but learned...

author: coppice
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 20, 2024, 03:43:22 pm
content: Quote from: jwet on February 20, 2024, 03:27:19 pmThere are very interesting dynamics related to this type of product in large companies. Very few large organisations are agile. They can't adapt quickly with these types of product that have only one end product cycle of life in them. Its interesting how they (mis)manage the conflict between their slow development cycles and the fast market cycles. I remember in the early 90s Motorola attacked the market for CD-ROM chips and PC motherboard chip sets. In both cases the market window for any generation of product was about a year to 18 months. Their development cycle was longer. Big lumbering companies like Intel, whose core business is in these rapid cycling products, have multiple generations in different stages of development at any one time. Not Motorola. Much of their business was in products with a considerable life, and they tended to develop new generations sequentially. They had a hit with one pass of PC chip sets, and one pass of CD-ROM chips. After that they produced some nice chips for subsequent generations, each a little to late to take a decent market share. They could have stepped back, and thought maybe going 1x, to 2x, to 4x CD-ROM isn't for us. Maybe we need to skip a generation, and get something out in a timely manner. Nope. They gave up.

author: mawyatt
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 20, 2024, 03:49:10 pm
content: Quote from: jwet on February 20, 2024, 01:08:28 pmThe semi folks told automotive to take a back seat to the phone and laptop customers then, and automotive tried to lobby congress to "force" semi to move them back on top of the major chip supply chain, and were unsuccessful!Best,

author: coppice
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 20, 2024, 04:01:17 pm
content: Quote from: jwet on February 20, 2024, 01:08:28 pmEven if you start with a standard chip that basically suits an automotive application, by the time you have it fully qualified for automotive use its a custom part. Automotive silicon is a devil's bargain. Nice volumes. Shame about the margins. We were starved of design resources while an entire new MCU line, cloning the functionality of an existing MCU line, was developed for automotive requirements. After customers started working with the early silicon, which worked just fine, the business assessment was the margins were unworkable and the whole thing was killed. I've heard people from other companies tell similar tales about their love hate relationship with automotive. Similar things happen with security. I am aware of multiple businesses developing chips that needed to be produced in a security qualified fab (I've forgotten the specific name for that) killing the program when they realised just what getting one of their fabs qualified really meant. The long development cycle of chips means quite a few start out hopefully, only to find the world has radically changed by a chip's availability.

author: coppice
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 20, 2024, 04:07:06 pm
content: Quote from: mawyatt on February 20, 2024, 03:49:10 pmI don't think the automotive customers were ever at the top of the supply chain. They didn't need to be. Historically their needs have been fairly predictable. Its one of the reasons the silicon vendors don't walk away from these low margin customers. Some models may flop, but basically the same electronics modules go into another car that sells well. COVID upset the balance in the force. The EV market is probably continuing that disruption.

author: mawyatt
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 20, 2024, 04:07:16 pm
content: Remember at an IEEE conference way back when a senior Motorola guy stood up and held his phone up and said "Show me the SiGe in these phones", he was a GaAs designer that thought GaAs ruled the RF/MW world. Reason I remember this is we were on the panel with Dr. Tom Lee from Stanford about the future of Silicon in RF applications, we were for SiGe and Tom for CMOS and where the IEEE MTT RFIC Symposium originated.Not long after this IBM had shipped their One Billionth SiGe PA chip in 5AM and completely displaced GaAs PAs in phones!! IBM did lots of stuff like that back then, including making all of Kodak's CMOS imaging camera chips!!Best,

author: mawyatt
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 20, 2024, 04:15:03 pm
content: Quote from: coppice on February 20, 2024, 04:01:17 pmSee earlier about the "Trusted Foundry Program", which allowed USG to use qualified commercial fabs for "sensitive" applications designed by qualified contractors. Back in 90s we got US Congress to "Plus Up" funds for a specific USG agency to buy down IBM SiGe technology, this later became the seedling for the Trusted Foundry concept.Best

author: coppice
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 20, 2024, 04:17:29 pm
content: Quote from: mawyatt on February 20, 2024, 04:07:16 pmMotorola Semiconductors biggest customers were Motorola's equipment businesses. This could make them very myopic. When proposing any kind of product idea the first questions would be about whether the communications businesses could make use of it. I suspect many the equipment businesses looked at Motorola's semiconductor offerings in a similar narrow manner. The decline and fall of the Motorola empire is an interesting tale.

author: coppice
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 20, 2024, 04:19:34 pm
content: Quote from: mawyatt on February 20, 2024, 04:15:03 pmIs that a government/defence specific program or it the same one people like the bank card chip makers use? I was never quite sure.

author: mawyatt
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 20, 2024, 04:38:28 pm
content: Quote from: coppice on February 20, 2024, 04:19:34 pmDon't know about the bank use, our experience was only with USG use.The special agency had their own fab on campus and it was managed by National Semiconductor at the time. This was a special arrangement with National as all the people in the fab had to be cleared to even be on the agency premise. This on campus silicon fab was falling behind technology-wise quickly and another means was needed to allow special USG chip fabrication.The concept of the Trusted Foundry was select US (started with IBM in Burlington, Vt) foundries would be paid to setup for processing highly sensitive chips for special USG applications. These had to be processed in highly "controlled" environments where only "cleared" people were allowed at the time, and the wafers/chips stored in secured areas screened and setup for such, this included all the associated design details and data, as well as all computers associated with this effort. Basically no practical means by any attempt to glean information about the chips before, during and after processing, including testing was possible.Best,

author: jwet
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: February 20, 2024, 05:36:55 pm
content: A couple of notes in this fast and furious thread-Coppie- Old automotive with engine ECU's, drive train and body etc was pretty stodgy, served by only a few guys that liked the abuse, etc. Modern automotive is infotainment and driver assistance, camera, networking, blind spot detect. The OEM's still think they can treat the Semico's like captured slaves- the worm has turned...A lot of chips required trusted foundry and things like security clearances/being read in. HDMI is a very common one. If you could get an unencrypted stream of bits from and HD source, it would be really clean pirating tool. Its not so easy and you end up with a generation old copy.

author: coppice
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 20, 2024, 05:52:27 pm
content: Quote from: jwet on February 20, 2024, 05:36:55 pmEngine management is now pretty simple. In the early 90s it was handled by leading edge parts. What eventually became the MC56800 series DSPs started in the early 90s as an engine management chip in 0.5um, which at that time was as fine as things got. To take that process and be prepared to automotive qualify it did require a certain masochistic streak.

author: David Hess
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 20, 2024, 06:21:55 pm
content: Quote from: coppice on February 20, 2024, 04:17:29 pmMy experience with Motorola came from the 68HC11 series microcontrollers. Motorola had great engineering support, but none of the chips were ever available, even while they were advertising them, so we went with PIC instead.

author: Zoli
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: February 21, 2024, 07:07:00 am
content: Quote from: jwet on February 20, 2024, 05:36:55 pmOne of the reasons for the HDMI 2.x standards(beside the extended bandwidth and other improvements) was the leak of the HDMI 1.x master key.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 21, 2024, 09:18:51 am
content: Quote from: David Hess on February 20, 2024, 06:21:55 pmI had a similar problem with good-on-paper Maxim semiconductor tester pin drivers. Visible on many sites (e.g. DigiKey) with prices, but never any availability.There's a maxim, especially visible on sci.electronics.design from people named in TAoE: "friends don't let friends use Maxim". Iimaginethat's because they designed innovative equipment with small production runs over many years, and that might not fit Maxim's business model.

author: David Hess
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 21, 2024, 09:51:59 am
content: Quote from: tggzzz on February 21, 2024, 09:18:51 amLater I had the same problem with Maxim, except for their interface products like the MAX232, although they were happy to send free samples of the parts I was never able to buy.In contrast I never had problems getting parts from Linear Technology or National, but of course they are gone now. International Rectifier was always a problem.

author: jwet
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: February 21, 2024, 01:30:46 pm
content: tggzzz- I addressed some of this in my second chapter post toward the beginning of this thread above. You're right for the most part but it wasn't by design and it hurt Maxim tremendously long term. Our CEO couldn't believe that our hyper growth (30%/yr) was real and by the time he did, we were in a deep hole. I'm not apologizing or sugar coating just trying to explain something that few understand. I was there for 25 years through a lot of ups and downs.Maxim was somewhat quietly acquired by Analog Devices last year too. That's one of the reasons I feel free to write about the old Maxim. Maxim did last the longest due to a lot of factors. If you look at analog IC company history with Burr-Brown, PMI, SSM, Harris, Raytheon and 50 other analog IC companies, its a very tough business and each company had their own sins and augered in for their own reasons. Every company has there own limits on their growth- poor deiiveries is one govenor on growth- not a great one admittedly but there are many ways to die in the analog ic business.LTC worked on a very different strategy than Maxim fundamentally- they were a boutique brand and targetted low and medium volume precision industrial. Another strategy was to make very low volume (unit) pricing high through disti's. This was a motivation to themselves and a deterrent to very low volume guys. They never experienced the kind of growth that Maxim did. National was old and huge- they had fabs that went for blocks in Sunnyvale at that time with 20% utilization- part of the reason that there part of TI. Its really a tightrope. They were acquired a decade ago.Maxim's ultra liberal free sample policy was kind of a hint that we didn't want single unit sales, we'll give you 2 of anything, then please place an order well in advance, etc. We funded a lot of college student projects and hobby projects but the intent was to make samples easy to get for anyone, something that used to be difficult for low volume guys in the old days. The industry was kind of forced to follow.Few are aware that it takes two to three months for a wafer to get through a fab on an exotic analog process. Most of our process had 100's of process moves; lithography, ion implant, epi growth, etching, metal, trim and cleaning moves in between each, etc. etc. We had express lots and "rocket lots" where parts were hand expedited but this was rare. This was wafers, then you had test, trim, singulation, packaging and final test. At release, each part had adequate box stock for sampling and 6 mos. of projected sales- we made 30,000 line items and it wasn't possible to stock them all. Again, our sins and our unique insanity.

author: harerod
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: February 21, 2024, 02:23:15 pm
content: Quote from: jwet on February 21, 2024, 01:30:46 pmThis sample policy would be perceived differently by the small fry. The situation in Germany in the late nineties looked somewhat like this: A private person could buy electronics from grocery stores (Conrad, Reichelt). Students and professionals would get smallest volume stuff from a few expensive pharmacies (RS, Farnell). Anything above a dozen or so would see you headed towards distris, who were only interested in selling rather large MOQ's. A player like Wuerth, whose sales force would tour the small companies and hand out pin-up calenders and gummy bears was somewhat unique. However, Wuerth has other issues, which makes them less desirable for quality designs.When I became self-employed in 2004, the distribution situation was rather nice. At that time we had distris like Digikey, Farnell and Mouser (not a favorite of mine), who would reliably deliver small quantities to small businesses. From that time forward my policy has been to check if a component was available form at least two of those distris, before designing it in. Exceptions from that rule, made because some highly specific property was required, nearly always led to issues down the road.I appreciate it if a company gives away free samples. I would only take them up on their offer, if I could ensure small volume delivery down the road. So, while a free sample policy is much appreciated, a small volume order policy (e.g. Microchip Direct) is way more valuable.The general insight that certain components have a life-time of less than a year, is something that I preach to clients constantly. Their products' life-cycles are quite often measured in several years or even decades at super small quantities, compared to what we read about many semiconductor components earlier in this thread.If a client insists on using certain "volatile" components (e.g. TFT-displays), I recommend getting a stash that would last either for the whole product lifetime or at least gives us a buffer for redesigns.

author: coppice
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 21, 2024, 02:25:23 pm
content: Quote from: jwet on February 21, 2024, 01:30:46 pmSemiconductors are always a tightrope, but analogue is a breeze compared to the high end. Your multi-billion dollar leading edge fab needs to make big bucks in its first 2 years, or it will be just a low value me too plant by the time it gets well loaded. Get your product timings or mix wrong for the fab's startup and the results can be very sad. In the early 90s, when 0.5um was state of the art, Motorola made a big bet on Power PC, but made a mess of the execution. The processors were fine, but they messed up the chip set and other support badly, so it was too hard to use the processors. Lots of design ideas which would have needed to be fabbed in 0.5um were rejected in the run up to the Power PC launch. "No, you can't do that. We need all that 0.5um capacity for the Power PC". The Power PC didn't sell well, and they had a limited number of plan B devices in the pipeline to use the capacity. That was a sad time for them, but very much self inflicted.

author: jwet
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: February 21, 2024, 03:25:59 pm
content: >>>Semiconductors are always a tightrope, but analogue is a breeze compared to the high end.Digital must be a grinder- I have no experience there- analog may be a relative breeze but was certainly challenging too. The rewards in Analog are very high- its fundamentally a better business- higher value, higher margin, etc.Working at the bleeding edge on high volume digital like Intel would have cost me countless sleepless nights. They were on a high speed escalator with no exits. Guys like Intel had fundamentally one product, very tough. They tried to maintain some diversification with microcontrollers, etc but the pull of big CPU's had just too much gravity- it sucked up everything. Motorola did a better job of this diversification but the 68K and PowerPC didn't have the kind of share as Intel (better performance in the race several times though). I'm sure other digital outfits working in state of the art fabs had amazing challenges too. Analog is much more forgiving. In digital, you're always driving a mountain road with a 500 foot drop just off the shoulder. It had a lot of concentration. Not for me.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 21, 2024, 04:54:36 pm
content: Quote from: jwet on February 21, 2024, 01:30:46 pmUnderstood and accepted.Keep up the good work on one of the more interesting current threads.

author: coppice
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 21, 2024, 05:11:31 pm
content: Quote from: jwet on February 21, 2024, 03:25:59 pmIn companies with a state of the art digital process, everyone in the company is looking at that 500 foot drop. Most people in the company might be doing analogue, or mixed signal stuff that only needs a fairly fine process. However, the ups and downs of the leading edge part of the business, with the massive rolling investments it requires, means a slip-up will hurt all those non-leading edge divisions too. As companies left the memory market, all the other divisions breathed a sigh of relief, because the ups and downs of the memory business dragged everyone with it.

author: mawyatt
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 21, 2024, 05:54:49 pm
content: Quote from: coppice on February 21, 2024, 02:25:23 pmDidn't IBM also make the PowerPC, but in a SOI process?Reason we ask, vaguely recall when the custom RH32 space processor was being developed in a GaAs CMOS like process called CHFET. When attending the CHFET process developments we asked about the hole mobility in GaAs as it's considerably less than electrons, which will cause the PFET to be much larger area than the NFET for an equal strength device inverter. We were told that we weren't a specialist in semiconductor physics and just go away, as we didn't know anything about GaAs!!Recall this was a problem with the envisioned GaAs CHFET Processor called RH32, as it would have a much weaker pull-up due to the weaker P Channel devices, and they couldn't be sized for equal strength as this would load the N Channel with too much capacitance and slow the node down!! So they ended up with a very weak pull up and vaguely recall that the processor ended up having to work mostly on negative edges due to the weak pull up, sorta like very old NMOS logic!!Later we mentioned the PowerPC as a replacement and were told that it's not Rad-Hard and can't be used in space (much later found out Motorola was using PowerPC in the Iridium satellites)!! We asked about the IBM PowerPC version since it's on an IBM CMOS SOI process and should fundamentally be somewhat Rad-Hard. We were then told IBM wouldn't allow them to acquire any for Rad tolerance testing, so said are you familiar with the Apple Macintosh computer?They had a puzzled look, and we said you can buy one down the street at the Apple store, it's got the IBM PowerPC in it, and the SOI version. Void the warranty and take PowerPC SOI processor out and do all the testing you want!! Again told to leave and never got invited to any related meetingsAfter likely $1B totally invested, the RH32 never really made it for any serious use, and the PowerPC processor & architecture went on to become useful for space applications.Best,

author: coppice
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 21, 2024, 09:07:38 pm
content: Quote from: mawyatt on February 21, 2024, 05:54:49 pmI don't know about their processes, but the Power PC came from IBM. IBM were trying to build an ecosystem around it, to drive it into the mainstream against Intel. Motorola was the biggest player to get on board.

author: David Hess
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 22, 2024, 01:26:46 am
content: Quote from: coppice on February 21, 2024, 09:07:38 pmThe way I remember it, Motorola contributed their 88k bus to the PowerPC project, but I never found out why.

author: jwet
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: February 22, 2024, 04:13:44 am
content: One Wire History>Back a few Days ago- "harerod" asked about the Dallas DS18x20 1 Wire Thermometer>>>>I wonder if you could share a story how the DS18x20 1-wire thermometer came into existence.I'm going to expand the scope of this a little and explain 1 wire a bit more generally- the DS18X20 was a key part that I'll get to in short order. Like I said before, the root part- DS1820 existed a few years before Maxim acquired Dallas (2001), the DS18x20 parts with an embedded letter expanded on certain features and came later mostly after the acquisition. I believe ADI/Maxim/Dallas continues to proliferate this line to this day. There are a few key people and a few things that came together to make this happen. The primary people involved were Dallas VP Mike Bolan and Director Level Design Manager Don Dias. This little assignment gave me a chance to touch base with Don, an amazing guy- retired now but a real force inside Dallas and a major driver of their success.Mike Bolan was sort of an idea man. He was a University of Cincinnati alum that maintained ties to UC and used them as a prime hiring ground for new grads. They have a somewhat unusual program in the Engineering and Architecture/Design schools where each student alternates semesters with internships in relevant industries. It makes for some well rounded new graduates. Mike reported directly to the CEO, Vin Prothro and was nominally Don Dias's boss. He had the complete trust of Vin and pursued any wim or direction he liked with almost no oversite. Dallas didn't have the strict launch discipline that I explained for Maxim earlier. He could take technology and user needs, hypothesize needs and stitch them together and create many IC functions- he really was good at this. As an example- one of the devices he created were silicon delay lines. Delay lines are sometimes necessary to create setup or hold delays in the nanoseconds to microsecond range. In the late 70's, these were 14 pin dip looking passive LC all pass type filters built by tiny hands, usually female, by companies like Data Delay Devices. They were often kind of a bodge but there were legitimate reasons to use them especially when DRAM made its appearance with RAS and CAS type addressing that micros didn't directly generate. Mike Bolan reasoned that if you could tame or trim the propagation delay of a series of inverters- you could make cheap, monolithic delay lines to replace the DDD hand wound ones. They were cheap to manufacture but their value was significant and customers were used to paying $3 for a delay line. They could be made for a dime- this is nice margin and at least initially, this was an amazing business. Dallas still sells fixed and variable delay lines- the first being 5 tap delays of 10 nS each- the DS1000-50. They have proliferated mightily and there are every variant anyone could want. A good thing about this market was since Dallas was a mixed signal company, they could do laser trimming at low cost in their cheap processes. The logic guys couldn't copy them easily and the analog guys who could trim didn't understand the problem. This was the kind of very clever stuff that Mike Bolan was famous for. More later.Don Dias was a mixed signal design director/senior engineer that also had launch authority within Dallas. He understood analog IC and mixed signal design at a deep level. Esoteric things like precision band-gap references, small ADC's and the like. The bandgap reference, the ubiquitous magic 1.235v pseudo zener, is an exercise in temperature nulling. Its relies on stacking a well characterized constant current driven Vbe with a negative slope (-2.1 mV/C) on top of a PTAT (proportional to absolute temperature) device. The result is a voltage reference with "zero" tempco. Murphy is allways watching but you can make very good references with bandgaps- down to 10 ppm without killing yourself. I won't try to explain it further- look at Gray and Meyer- it really is a fascinating and elegant circuit. Its not difficult to make an analog temperature sensor if you can make references- ADI and National both made several types. The AD590 put out 1 uA/kelvin or .298 mA at room; The NS LM334 was a similar part that could be either a current source or a temp sensor with a bit of outside persuasion. Both were about +-2 degrees accuracy but both were a bit expensive. You could also roll your own from scratch with a Vbe (usually an NPN with CB shorted), a current mirror with a MAT-01 matched pair NPN and an OP-07 and a pile of low tempco resistors- also not cheap either. After all this, you just had volts of course. Don Dias wanted to integrate a temp sensor with a small, slow, cheap 9-12 bit ADC. This created the DS1620, a 3 wire serial SPI like temp sensor with onboard ADC, alarms, etc. A pretty hot product. Any microcontroller could bit bang the SPI with a dozen lines of assembly and voila- temperature. The ADC could trade speed for resolution and at low speed 4/sec, you could get 13 bits- .025 deg C IIRC. Accuracy was 2 degC nominally.There were a few other trends at the same time. Phillips (now NXP) had devised a 2 wire protocol called I2C- an inter-integrated circuit bus that allowed low speed setup and housekeeping to be done over a clever open collector 2 wire bus. Phillips made little ADC/DAC's, Frequency Synthesizers, TV circuits, Tape recorder circuits, AM/FM Tuners, Memory, RTC's, etc with this interface. In a piece of consumer electronics, it made interconnect much similar and took advantage of having some kind of small MCU available to tickle all these I2C devices. Phillips target application was consumer electronics like TV's and Radios but other saw the value. I2C was a hit and others swooped in and copied it to make EEPROM's and a host of nice little devices. Phillips then swooped in and sued the lot of them and generally won all the cases. Their royalties were pretty expensive but if you got caught, you were kind of stuck and many companies bought licenses from Phillips and carried on with a bit lower margins. At the same time, lots of companies were trying to get around the Phillips patents/licensing and it became common to see "2 Wire" devices marketed by many including Maxim. It worked until it didn't and most vendors eventually coughed up some licensing as the standard aged a bit and Phillips negotiated on price or would trade patents for a license.Another trend of the day that was emerging was heat worries. When you put a million transistors on a single die and crank the clock up to 66 or 100 Mhz, things get warm. Intel was struggling with the problem and trying to solve it but system builders out of at least some caution thought temp sensing might make some sense. Besides processors, there was battery charging going on, spinning hard drives, LCD's with funny tempcos; all sitting on your lap with 200 other passengers flying across the ocean. It wasn't mandatory but notebook guys could see a potential billion dollar lawsuit out there.What notebook guys wanted was to measure temps at 3 or 4 points in a notebook for safety, if nothing else. I2C would have a been a nice solution but it was missing one key feature- it was simple enough to go poll these sensors and display temps, etc but what if the supervisory micro got hung up. What was wanted was something like I2C with an additional open collector "Alert" output that could be wired-or together to create a hardware only shutdown or could go to an NMI on a controller- often both. SMBus was born, a consortium of companies including Dallas (pre Maxim), Maxim, Intel, Dell and a few others put the spec together. It side stepped the I2C licensing as it has several features that make it different from I2C but it is mostly interoperable. Dallas created the first 2 Wire, SMBUS temp sensor- the DS-75. It was a Don Dias design with the heart of the DS1620 with SMBUS. This was a genius part with all the right features, alerts, alarms, hysterisis, variable resolution, etc. It was quickly copied by everyone including National as their LM-75 but Dallas was the original developer. I did a study on sensors once and I thought that the DS-75 was the most well defined IC that I'd ever seen- it just nailed the problem completely. Many variants followed and many billions were made. A notebook or desktop PC has at least 3 of these to this day.Around the same time, Dallas had responded to an RFQ by GM for a keyless entry system- very state of the art. The system used LF signalling and encoded signals with bursts of carrier or no burst of carrier in an ASK kind of modulation. The "baseband" of this was a device that could take a bit stream and convert it into long and short pulses that would key the carrier. The GM keyless entry was a bust- not really in Dallas's wheelhouse but this little baseband gadget is what became of the work. It formed the basis of the 1 wire protocol after a few people in Dallas looked at it. Little is every wasted in an IC company. It was optimized for wired operation and patented. The first product was a so called "silicon serial number"- a device that contained a unique 64 bit code that could be used to individualize things. Things like PC boards and later the bain of modern existence, printer cartridges, etc. There were off shoots of this like Touch Memory that put a 1 wire device and a RTC/Ram in what looked like a small battery. These devices were the first electronic money- after the Maxim acquisition, our patent attorney saw that Dallas (now Maxim) had patented in fundamental form all the technology of smart card and EMV. Maxim enforced these patents vigorously and got royalties from most of the international smart card consortiums and banks. A nice little bonus.Meanwhile, Mike Bolan was watching all these trends and this 1 wire "microlan" as he labeled it. He identified several shortcomings of the SMBUS. One of the shortcomings of I2C in general is that you can only put 4 or 8 or the same device on a bus- you have a 7 bit address with 4 bits for a family and three bits on the device that can be used to select one of 8 devices with pin strapping. There are ways around this of course but Bolan said, "why not have 64k devices on a bus and why have two wires when 1 will do". SMBUS was unfortunately somewhat entrenched in the PC architecture already but a guy can dream. 1 Wire as above uses 1 open collector wire for data and address, ones being long pulses and zeros short ones, it could be automatically scanned to find devices (the most zero's wins and that device then goes quiet during initialization). It could be beefed up to go 1000 meters, ESD protected, etc- it was a good idea. You can read about in several places including a pretty good Wiki. Bolan was a huge proponent of this- maybe a bit overly, SMBUS was the defacto standard for the biggest application. Dias was a bit skeptical about 1 wire and its advantages as Bolan was touting- was there a market need for more than 8 devices in a system? With a little work, you could do 32 points using an commodity analog switch or multiple I2C segments of a processor- it got slow but 1 wire was pretty slow too (16 Kbits/sec). It turned out that Bolan found a customer that wanted to put 500 sensors on huge grain elevators to monitor temperatures. Grain elevators, can and do spontaneously explode. This was all the market justification that Bolan needed and the DS1820 was born. A DS1620 temp sensor plus ADC plus 1 wire interface.I did a study on sensors at Maxim somewhere a long the line. I made the observation that there are three "P's" involved in sensors. The first is physics- how the sensor senses whatever it senses- for temp, this was a PTAT device, the second P was processing- in this case A/D conversion and some averaging and alarming and the final P is presentation- the output data format- analog, SPI, I2C, SMBUS or 1 wire. These three P's are universal in all sensors and if you look a the progression of all sensors, the trend is toward a simple digital interface like I2C. Phone sensors have grown very sophisticated and almost all have a rich digital interface to present their results.Further iterations for the DS1820 along with process shrinks produced the DS18B20, a 9-12 bit resolution device vs. 9 bits of the DS1820. The DS18S20 was a cost reduced device at 9 bits. The DS18x20 devices were built on a lower cost .6 micron process at Dallas. The devices have been heavily copied/cloned and counterfeited, there are no official licensees. Dallas has a very elaborate temperature calibration system for these devices- accuracy can approach .5 degrees C. Its worth getting the real thing if accuracy matters at all.This is a little more than I know about this history. I hope harerod is pleased with the result. This will be the last of these for a bit- I have to get my Taxes together for Uncle Sam (and my wife!). I'll continue to follow this and may pipe in but these long stories are surprisingly time consuming. Thanks for your time and attention. I may post more content after April 15....Take Care,John Wettroth

author: coppice
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 22, 2024, 01:28:23 pm
content: Quote from: David Hess on February 22, 2024, 01:26:46 amThe 88k was such a weird project. Does anyone outside Motorola know about the 77k? That was a really interesting design, but I'm not sure if anyone outside Motorola ever heard of it before priorities changed, and it was dropped.

author: coppice
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 22, 2024, 01:34:24 pm
content: Quote from: jwet on February 22, 2024, 04:13:44 amHow well does that idea work in the US? They call them sandwich degrees in the UK, and they have a long history, but a very patchy history. The needs of industry and the needs of the universities and students don't consistently align very well. I know Hong Kong's HKUST silicon design degree program gets a number of people into internships in US design teams, so some people seem to make it work internationally.

author: coppice
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 22, 2024, 02:09:49 pm
content: Quote from: jwet on February 22, 2024, 04:13:44 amAn interesting little anecdote about hot ICs. In about 1980 I was at a whole day presentation of new semiconductor products by Motorola in London. In the Q&A section at the end someone asked what the Motorola people thought would be the trend for dealing with heat as the complexity of ICs rose. A senior Motorola guy simply replied "We get 100W out of a power transistor. When the time comes we'll get 100W out of an IC.". He was dead serious, while the rest of the room, including his colleagues from Motorola, took this as a joke and laughed heartily. Well, they aren't laughing now. There was some very narrow thinking in the room that day. Its interesting how attitudes and expectations change.

author: harerod
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: February 22, 2024, 02:19:53 pm
content: Quote from: coppice on February 22, 2024, 01:34:24 pmSandwich degree, ey?I hold one of those. Places called "University of Applied Sciences" (ger. "Fachhochschule", "FH") would hand out diplomas after 8+ semesters. Two of those, 3rd and 6th, would be spent as interns. During internships, a much reduced number of lectures would be attended.Due to Germany's rather decentralized education system, we would see big differences between institutions. Furthermore, the general consensus was that the FH graduates were second class engineers, in the sense that they lacked the theoretical (math) background that was part of "Technical University" (ger. "Technische Universität", "TU") training. However, the experience from the internships was sought for many medium grade positions. Conversely, payment was lower and career opportunities were limited, especially with the larger employers.Things have changed since the 1990's. Although I painfully see my limitions compared to TU graduates of my generation, these days math skills seem to be lower in general. A couple of years ago I found myself explaining Laplace- and z-transform to TU Munich graduates (one doctor and a couple of masters in electrotechnics). I also prefer to actually calculate delicate circuits, instead of blindly trusting simulations.Judging from experience with recent applicants, a skill like "silicon design" listed in the CV would mostly imply having seen a certain software tool during education.

author: mawyatt
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 22, 2024, 02:55:12 pm
content: There was an interesting story about the origins of camera autofocus sensor invented at Honeywell. None of the camera folks wanted to pay royalties and kept producing infringing products which forced litigation. This was the 1st litigation using remote techniques as Honeywell filed suit against Minolta first. After a decade long legal fight Honeywell won and were awarded triple damages at ~$100M, then went around to all the other camera OEMs and collected royalties.An interesting thought (we don't know) is if Honeywell were allowed to collected prior royalties since all the OEMs were notified of infringement before the Minolta suit? Our thinking would be yes since the OEMs had been properly notified of infringement and chose to ignore such and waited until Minolta lost. Seems if they refused to pay prior then Honeywell could simply initiate another lawsuit and use the Minolta judgement as grounds and easily win in short order.Comments from those in the know???Best,

author: mawyatt
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 22, 2024, 03:06:45 pm
content: Quote from: harerod on February 22, 2024, 02:19:53 pmVery important point!!When we created the first Graduate Courses in RFIC technology way back as a adjunct prof, we emphasized that students should be able to crudely sketch the waveforms of circuit under study and figure out bias points BEFORE jumping in front of Cadence. As expected this fell on mostly deaf ears, so we often created homework/exams that would cause significant stress if directly thrown at Cadence without regard to a rudimentary understanding of how the circuit worked!!Devious yes, but it did help a few students (we hired them!!) to think before jumping in front of Cadence!!Best,

author: harerod
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: February 22, 2024, 03:07:41 pm
content: Quote from: coppice on February 22, 2024, 02:09:49 pmHow should the poor guy have known? At one time my Atari ST sported a 16MHz-rated 68000, overclocked to 24MHz, instead of the original 8MHz CPU. The general impression was that Motorola stuff was rather sturdy.

author: harerod
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: February 22, 2024, 03:12:09 pm
content: Quote from: mawyatt on February 22, 2024, 03:06:45 pmWe have a saying in German, which goes "Nur die Harten kommen in den Garten." A English rendering may be "This is Sparta!!!".While not fun at the time, rigid training helps a lot down the road. Says the engineer 2nd class...

author: coppice
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 22, 2024, 03:13:35 pm
content: Quote from: harerod on February 22, 2024, 02:19:53 pmIn the UK sandwich degrees have been a mixed bag. I haven't looked at them for years, so I don't know how they may have changed. They come in what is termed thick and thin sandwiches. A thick sandwich is basically just a 3 or 4 year degree from the point of view of the university, with a year in industry before and a year in industry afterwards. There were people at top tier universities on this type of program. In return for some commitment to work you can get some sponsorship from the industrial partner.Thin sandwiches are specialised degrees, because the timing of the teaching and industrial placement sections don't align with the normal degree teaching semesters. These were more often seen at the lower ranked institutions, but not exclusively. I've known people who did thin sandwich degrees who were taught to a high standard.Quote from: harerod on February 22, 2024, 02:19:53 pmThe biggest problem with CVs is the very common type that lists "I worked on this", "I worked on that", without saying if they were the project lead or the tea boy/girl.Every academic I have spoken to in recent years complained about there no longer being any real lab work in university programs now, due to cost consideration and weird health and safety clampdowns. Some of these have been the mavericks who still do some, and constantly fight to keep the lab work going. Others have just secumbed to pressure, and do pseudo lab work with matlab. or other software tools. Things like MCU programming is probably an exception. Still mostly software work, but cheap and with such benign hardware the health and safety people don't create obstacles.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 22, 2024, 03:58:16 pm
content: Quote from: mawyatt on February 22, 2024, 03:06:45 pmPrecisely.Such reliance on numbers without theory intuition and experience was a pet hate of my father. He only begrudgingly got an HP85 very late on in his career, for just that reason.His attitude was good. One of his last papers was predicting how a PWR would react if its bottom ceased to exist. He didn't simulate, but used the equations (validated with experiments) of how water flows down the plughole in a bath. He concluded there would be time to scram it before the core warped and prevented insertion of control rods.

author: harerod
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: February 22, 2024, 08:58:23 pm
content: Quote from: jwet on February 22, 2024, 04:13:44 amjwet, thank you very much for taking the time to write that essay. Let's continue this story, when you time permits.I have written several 1wire-master implementations on different platforms. I have also wrotten different slave implementations for custom sensors or as replacement, due to issues in the supply lines (most recently due to Chipageddon...). All this makes me wonder how big the 1wire logic is on a DS18x20? I assume that this is implemented by a state machine, not a CPU? How many transistors might that take?

author: jwet
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: February 23, 2024, 02:22:15 pm
content: Harrod, it's certainly just logic, I'll pulse Dias on this.Also on sandwich degrees, UC extended the program to 5 yrs to give same class time. My son studied industrial d3sign there and has done well in his career, he's 35. I think it's especially good for industrial design and architecture.Dallas hired a lot apps and business people out of UC. For designers and very technical people, the tended towards big 10 schools in the Midwest- Illinois, Michigan, Purdue, Indiana, Iowa, Ohio, etc. Maxim was big on MIT, Berkeley and Stanford grads for IC designers but there was a smatter of everything- and some other favorites- Caltech, Worcester, Illinois (My alma mater) and Iowa (our Last CEO's alma mater) along with some brits like Fullagar (Trinity I believe).Stay tuned on your question.

author: Njk
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: February 25, 2024, 10:24:25 am
content: Quote from: coppice on February 22, 2024, 01:28:23 pmIt was a century old company, no wonder there were many interesting projects of various success and publicity. For instance, the MCore CPU architecture. It was designed for low power applications, was capable to operate using a power voltage of a bit more than 2V. I heard about the demo where an MCore MCU was running powered by improvised lemon battery. Symphony digital radio, the first SDR chipset for car radio makers. The RF front-end was still of analog type but all the IF processing was done by 56xxx DSP. Time Processing Unit (TPU), a complex proprietary sub-system like TI's PRUCC but more difficult to understand so it required longer learning curve. Still in production, AFAIK. There were also a controversial initiatives like pushing big endianess or attempts to model the SW quality management process using that for semiconductors (M-gates system, CMM/CMMI levels, etc.). The quality folks were a large and powerful clan where diversity was thriving so there was a good career opportunity for women. And there were some funny traditions. It was mandatory for every employee on Fridays to report upstairs about his personal achievements during this week. The CEO could not report to upstairs so he distributed his weekly report to every employee, completing the circuit.

author: coppice
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 25, 2024, 11:19:11 am
content: Quote from: Njk on February 25, 2024, 10:24:25 amApart from the 88k, I think all the things you mentioned were very pragmatic and made money. The 88k was set up for failure.We were never required to report upwards on a Friday.There are always career opportunities for women in engineering. Its so rare to find a CV from a woman for a seriously technical electronics job, that's not pure software, that everyone tries to fit her skills to their needs, however badly they actually fit. CVs from women are so rare they get passed around for everyone to look at, and ponder over, like anything rare. Motorola did have more women in senior engineering positions than most companies, however few that might be. I reported to one.They did go overboard for the CMM/CMMI stuff at one point. They were very aware, as stated in presentations. that getting to level 5 was a tradeoff. Somehow they still kept trying to get to level 5 across the board. It all seemed a very messed up way of trying to improve their capabilities. Seeking perfection has a bad habit of harming genuine improvement. They also had a huge 10x speedup push, to get designs out the door faster. That was such an ambitious goal when presented in a simplistic way it really put people off. Thought through, its easy to see how you can have some long slow complex projects running in parallel with fast turn around spins, and manage a much better average turn around time by ensuring those fast spins get to market fast. However, presenting people with a simplistic 10x goal up front turned most of them off so badly they were not listening to the details.

author: David Hess
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 25, 2024, 01:28:47 pm
content: Quote from: harerod on February 22, 2024, 03:07:41 pmMy understanding is that this relates to how operating temperature affects reliable operating life. The standard for reliable operating life from the big names was something like 20 years, but if you were willing to sacrifice this, then higher power is possible allowing higher clock speeds.

author: harerod
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: February 25, 2024, 04:53:24 pm
content: Quote from: David Hess on February 25, 2024, 01:28:47 pmWould I do that today? No. However, back in 1990 it was just impressive how that 68k handled the overclocking.

author: Njk
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: February 25, 2024, 05:07:09 pm
content: Quote from: coppice on February 25, 2024, 11:19:11 amI'd jumped on the board of SPS in late nineties and had been working for the company for the next decade and half. Never heard about the 88k. Perhaps the time was wrong because the project is too old. Anyway only a big organization can afford the luxury of designing something for loss. It's not always clear if and when and for whom the thing will be profitable. The lone cowboy approach (take the venture capital service and start running around like a deer wounded in the ass from the shotgun, to entertain the sponsor) is not sustainable for everyone. Remember, IBM PC was not created in that way.QuoteI'd travelled a lot at the expense of the shareholders, but newer been in the UK. There must be many peculiarities at the locations like Basingstoke. The guys who were sent there all characterized the island as a place where everything is wrong. No one was brave enough e.g. to rent a car there. But I don't think it's protected from the corporate spam. Do you remember the Chris Galvin's weekly reports?BTW my daughter and her husband just received a formal job offer from the UK and passed the exam. Good luck for them.QuoteI do remember one Indian woman in senior engineering position, Padmasree Warrior. Another known spammer. She was very active, little Nikki Haley. But to no avail for her, so she eventually moved to Qualcomm and became CTO there. I heard many tales about women in EE (e.g. about the mother of the mother board at IBM) but my personal experience is different. At a times, my workload had tripled because of them. Known solution to the problem is to kick them upstairs ASAP.QuoteAbsolutely. But in the end, we've good memorabilia

author: coppice
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 25, 2024, 06:24:14 pm
content: Quote from: Njk on February 25, 2024, 05:07:09 pmI once joked at a dinner of Motorola people from various parts of the business that the biggest career limiter anyone could have in Motorola was travel sickness, which made them all laugh heartily. So I assume every division had big travel budgets. I never worked for Motorola in the UK. I work in HK, and left in 1994.

author: mawyatt
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 25, 2024, 07:00:41 pm
content: When we had our small research company that got acquired in 2006, on our board was an ex Motorola VP that headed up the Iridium project. He told stories about how they decided to build the satellites on the automotive production line to save costs. He said they could produce the satellites for ~$10M each, which was well below what a full space qualified satellite would have cost. As previously mentioned they also used the commercial Power PC as the main on board CPU.At the Smithsonian you can see the original Motorola engineering notebooks describing the Iridium concept, like a cell phone concept except the cell towers are moving overhead and handing off at ~28,000KPH, so your speed and position is almost stationary relative to the LEO sats. The Smithsonian also has the Iridium satellite on display.Best,

author: David Hess
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 26, 2024, 01:37:27 am
content: Quote from: harerod on February 25, 2024, 04:53:24 pmNot too long ago there was a jump in rated CPU junction temperatures to 80C instead of 50C. The increase in GPU junction temperatures has been even higher, with nVidia having had some big thermal problems in the past couple of years resulting in lawsuits. So they are doing it for you.I suspect this was achieved by lowering the reliable operating life down to 5 years for "consumer" hardware.

author: tautech
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 23, 2024, 09:39:34 am
content: How did I miss this thread ?More please.PSMike, can I post a pic you sent me a while back ?

author: mawyatt
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 23, 2024, 01:29:50 pm
content: Quote from: tautech on September 23, 2024, 09:39:34 amSure!!Best,

author: tautech
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 23, 2024, 08:39:07 pm
content: Quote from: mawyatt on September 23, 2024, 01:29:50 pmThanks Mike and IIRC you said you could share this as it was no longer subject to a NDA.I'll let you share info on your silicon signature.

author: schmitt trigger
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 23, 2024, 10:49:21 pm
content: I have always thought that the MOMA or other similar art museums should have a Silicon Art exhibition.

author: tautech
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 23, 2024, 11:00:33 pm
content: Quote from: schmitt trigger on September 23, 2024, 10:49:21 pmMember Noopy started his own here:https://www.eevblog.com/forum/projects/different-die-pictures/

author: mawyatt
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 23, 2024, 11:46:54 pm
content: Quote from: tautech on September 23, 2024, 08:39:07 pmThis isn't Silicon it's in a 650GHz Indium Phosphide process!!Favorite pastime is in upper left cornerThe circuit is a Wideband Direct Coupled Differential Square-Law Detector. One of the last circuits we designed before retiring (semi).BTW the initials AR in lower right are one of my former students. Was working on his PhD dissertation on the Origins of Phase Noise when we snatched him up. Knows more about PN than anyone we've ever met, brilliant young manMore chip images if folks are interested.Best,

author: mawyatt
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 23, 2024, 11:53:41 pm
content: Quote from: tautech on September 23, 2024, 11:00:33 pmAgree, Noopy has done an amazing amount of work on various chip/transistor/die imagesEveryone should spend some time in this Chip Image Museum of Modern ArtBest,

author: schmitt trigger
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 24, 2024, 12:04:13 am
content: Indeed, I am a big admirer of Noopy’s work. As I am sure all forum members who have seen his images.For I was thinking along the lines of a mainstream exhibition. Not only for us nerds.

author: mawyatt
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 24, 2024, 01:30:17 am
content: While rereading noted an error in post #2, now corrected.Best,

author: RJSV
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 24, 2024, 03:01:38 am
content: Might make a great book, man.If you can, locate enough funds for a book publishing project, could be a hit, placed in museum book stores!How's your writing skills, and motivation, to do the initial book authoring, avoiding using too many agents, etc. ?I did a 'micro' book; having ten basic pages / subjects, with hand drawn 'illustrations', and titled it 'Ten Things Wrong with CITY HALL'.Very crude, and I didn't stress over the comic book like form. My basic point here being that I determined to get the thing done, Self Published...at the local Copy Mat xerox store.On a bigger scale for you, but maybe find someone with experience doing most of it yourself. (On the other hand it might be more of a niche reading, with low sales, so you need advice there.)But I'm thinking museum book stores and gift shop sales...- - Rick B. In Hayward, Ca

author: RJSV
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 24, 2024, 03:07:55 am
content: Especially enjoyed the INDUCTOR in integrated form; square outline, and only 40% around the perimeter, (for best coil Q).

author: rsjsouza
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 24, 2024, 05:41:57 pm
content: I haven't seen this thread. Subscribed. Hopefully more stories come.

author: tautech
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 29, 2025, 01:09:33 pm
content: Quote from: rsjsouza on September 24, 2024, 05:41:57 pmYep.Bumped....

author: mawyatt
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 29, 2025, 03:24:38 pm
content: Rob,Not sure what "bumped" means, here's a couple chip images that some might find interesting.These are "oops" results from chip mishandlingNote the edge of the Image #1 and the Ball Bonds on #2.These are significantly downsized Low-Resolution images from the originals, in fact the #2 image is a result of our early attempts at Gigapixels by means of image "stitching" from long long ago. We had developed special focus stacking methods, custom test fixtures, XYZ Linear rails and controllers to do this back then. These type images took days to capture and was fully automated back then.These are very low resolution, however you can still see some detail if you zoom into the JPG images, guess what the black spot is on some of the ball bondsAnyway, hope this is what you were looking for, or maybe more old recollections from the distant past, let us know.BTW was just informed that some of our work from that distant past is being prepared for a Museum Display that I believe will be for public viewing, can't say when or where just yet but will keep things up to date.Best,

author: MK14
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 29, 2025, 04:28:19 pm
content: Quote from: mawyatt on January 29, 2025, 03:24:38 pm"Bumped", in forum/threads, usually means a post which brings an older, but interesting thread, such as this one, back up to the top of the current threads, list, in a section.To save me time explaining it further, here is 'google's', explanation:Quote

author: tautech
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 29, 2025, 08:38:37 pm
content: Quote from: mawyatt on January 29, 2025, 03:24:38 pmPlease tell.QuoteAll/any stories/images so they can be preserved for prosperity.Quote

author: mawyatt
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 29, 2025, 09:02:35 pm
content: Quote from: tautech on January 29, 2025, 08:38:37 pmThe tiny spherical ball bonds are highly reflective the reflect all the surroundings like a spherical mirror. The camera lens has antireflective coatings so this absorbs most of the impinging light and little is reflected back to the spherical mirror like ball bonds. They show no light from the camera lens area and thus the camera lens detects almost no light from the ball bonds in the area where it reflects light from the lens!!All this creates a black spot in the spherical ball bond appearance as "seen" by the cameraBest

author: jwet
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: February 02, 2025, 01:23:34 am
content: mawyatt- I might have a story or two left if you do. Your stories might have more interest but I'll contribute unless I hear strong opinions otherwise. I spent 20+ years in Analog IC definition and applications. Its a fascinating, high margin business. A couple of historical things that I think are interesting- anyone listening can chime in on any they'd like more details on-Analog Switch Technology- the very best business in the world.Supervisors and Super-Supervisors- it not just reset anymoreWhy are there so Damn Many Op-Amps? - how IC processes drive pure analog.Custom Analog- another lesson in IC economics and how IC packaging kills customs

author: schmitt trigger
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 02, 2025, 03:49:54 am
content: Jwet;I am more than intrigued with your teaser topics.I am sure that I am not the only one that would be interested in your stories.

author: mawyatt
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 02, 2025, 03:37:53 pm
content: Jwet,Very interested to here about those topicsBest

author: RoGeorge
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 02, 2025, 03:45:57 pm
content: Of course everybody want to hear more.

author: jwet
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: February 02, 2025, 08:20:46 pm
content: Ok I'll put some of these together in the coming weeks.

author: jwet
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: February 03, 2025, 06:06:38 pm
content: I decided to start with the "Super Supervisor" story and this is Part 1. This is the simplest of these and might give you some background on my fascination with the Semiconductor Business. I worked at Maxim for 25+ years after a system level career. Maxim had some delivery issues, this is very well known and I addressed it in the first series of these essays. Save any Maxim hate you might be harboring or take it elsewhere. I have heard it all (sometimes at high volumes), its in the past and I have explained it elsewhere.The supervisor business is an amazing business story. This explains the general layout of the business and some the insanity of it, part2 will get into the further insanity of the "Super Supervisor" piece.Around 1993, when I started with Maxim- their overall revenues were about $100 million, about 1/3 in Europe, 1/3 in Japan and 1/3 in the US spread out pretty evenly. (for reference, they were about $2.5B when acquired by ADI a few years back). Maxim's core strength was clever CMOS Analog products. They had aspirational products like second sources of Analog Devices Switches, ADC's and DAC portfolios but these didn't create a lot of light- they mainly raised the hackles of ADI- not a completely bad thing. The two product lines that made the most money were the MAX232 and all its variations and the MAX7xx series of microprocessor supervisors- our main topic in this little essay. Maxim made a complete line of Amplifiers, Comparators, ADC, DAC's, Multipliers and Power but these two lines are what really sold and kept the ship floating. I had a "real" analog background and could design charge amplifiers, 10 decade logarithmic amps, pico-ammeters and all the other exotica required for Nuclear Instrumentation that my first two jobs entailed. Everyone knew about the MAX232 and even when it was heavily second sourced, people came to Maxim as the originator and the quality source. The supervisors were emerging and we wanted to be the biggest supplier for these parts. No company had ever focused on supervisors and exploited it fully. TI had a few parts around the TL77xx, Dallas had their DS1232 and some japanese suppliers like Seiko and Ricoh had solutions though they stayed in Asia mainly. Maxim had about a dozen parts that tried to cover all the corners of the application space for these devices.Supervisors are a real analog function. The primary function is to keep a microprocessor from running when Vcc was too low and to produce a delay after Vcc came up for the oscillator to start up. Likewise on power down or brownouts. Almost all micros include a reset input but this is just a logic input maybe with a Schmidt trigger. Most system designers would hang an RC network on this logic input and call it a day. If you looked at quality military or good test instruments, you would see these fairly elaborate circuits with voltage references, comparators, monostables, logic and sometime discretes that did this function. This was probably a few dollars worth of stuff, fractions of a man month of design, test and refinement and it solved what most thought was a minor problem. A system powering up can get into funny states if done without a supervisor. If the micro starts running before the clock oscillator has stabilized, the system can get wedged into a zombie kind of half awake state. Power glitches can cause code execution errors that end badly. Usually cycling the power on and off would raise the system from the dead and this became sort of natural reflex for operating equipment. There is a famous HP98xx series story about a problem like this that existed for years. The digital micro guys sort of foisted ths problem on the system designer- here's this pin, once everything looks good, bring this up and the micro can start. The mioro guys really couldn't fix the problem very easily even if they knew how to design bandgaps and comparator, etc, their commodity often NMOS process couldn't really do much of a job of it. Some micros had long counters that would wait out perhaps 1024 clock cycles before starting- this didn't address the Vcc bit and ten flip flops isn't nothing on a 7 micron process. The other difficulty was that these circuits had to operate reliably as Vcc went up from zero and back down. Biasing up references and comparators isn't always a completely deterministic process. You could put some jelly bean parts together but they might get squirrelly when their own Vcc went away. These little problems are the ones that you hate to have in the field. If you can afford it, its nice to have robust supervision in place.Maxim's supervisor product line was interesting. There are really about a dozen issues and variations around the simple root problem. For example, most micros had a active low reset input but one very popular one, the 8051, had an active high reset. For these kind of twilight issues mentioned above, you couldn't just stuff an inverter in without a bit of thought- how did it act as you swept its Vcc. Another problem many customers requested was to give a bit of warning or of an impending reset on power down. This feature was called low line. At say -5%, you'd like an output that might generate an interupt to give your gadget a chance to tidy up a bit, store some variables, park the head, etc and then at -10%, you'd get the hard reset that would be lights out for your micro. Below is a little list of features that these first generation parts addressed. There were giant tables in our selector guides that would help you pick the right part often with the help of a Maxim FAE if you had real volumes. Of course, the list getting bigger as complexity, rabbits and farm cats tend to do.Variations, roughly in order of customer requests- Actual voltage thresholds for reset and low line. 5v nominals, 3.3v nominals, 12V input rails. Very precise levels. TI side stepped this mostly with the TL77xx series- use external voltage dividers to set thresholds, caps for delay times, etc. "Digital guys" didn't want to muck around with voltage dividers, 1% resistors, choosing caps for delays and such arcania, just integrate it all and I'll buy what I want. This created a dozen or more variations and then the famous "contact factory" which is implied on every data sheet if you want something else.- Reset Time- After Vcc rose to the right value, how much time should elapse until you let reset go. This varied, 200 mS was the nominal but customers had reasons for variations. Often one micro would poll another on power up so some had to come up quick, etc often with a bit of precision. Again, the barbaric way to do this was with an external cap. Once again the digital guys ruled and cap tolerances aren't great anyway. You also needed to discharge this cap if you were in a chattering Vcc condition so you got a full width reset, etc. Like I said, a real analog problem with a customer base that had low confidence in the analog skills.- Manual reset- the supervisor would generate the same orderly, delayed pulse from a button input- pullup resistor included- Power good input- an over-riding input that would hold reset off from a logic input- usually a power good input from a PS.- Battery Backup/RTC Features- the supervisor would have a reliable or'ing circuit that could use a coin cell to keep an RTC or some static RAM powered when the system was off. This usually also involved gating the chip enable so the processor couldn't step on ram during its dying gasps. There were other safety issues where the device wouldn't allow any current to flow into the Li cell as could happen with Schottky diodes or'ing circuits, etc. Li batteries really don't like to be charged! The supervisor also had to draw next to nothing in this backup condition.After a year or so, Maxim had five dozen external part numbers to define the major features and the pinouts with many parts having a four letter suffix that defined some of the lesser variables, voltages, timeout, etc. The overall number of variations was in the thousands! This is the sort of variability you get when you have ten condiments that you can put on a hamburger and allow them in any combination- if you turn on and off these 10 bits, you get a thousand variations! I thought this was insane but it really was what the market demanded and no one but Maxim was crazy enough to service it. Maxim built up a system in their fabs to track this kind of complexity.Now here is what is phenomenal about all this, all these thousands of part variation came out of two base die types or circuits basically! The business manager, we'll call him Joe Miller for anonymity was known as "mirv miller" at Maxim. (a reference to multiple re-entry vehicles from ICBM's and some engineer gallow's humor.) Becuase Maxim did CMOS analog, practically everything we made had to be laser trimmed so those voltage variations were a snap. We could also zap some metal to enable an inverter or shorten a counter chain for timing, we could trim caps, etc. There were some variatations that were handled with metal options where you hold a wafer that is about 90% complete, just short of metal and create variations with a final metal mask- much like mased roms. All this complexity was invisible to the customer, they just ordered a part number and assumed that they were unique and they were. These sort of things that can be done in IC business are unique. What makes the whole business so fantastic is that you have a relatively small circuit for a supervisor. You build them on a 200mm or later 300mm wafers and get tens of thousands of die from an single wafer. At a wafer cost of a few hundred dollars, you had a die cost of less than a penny. Packaging was another cent or two. You wouldn't even bother to test die, you would just "blind build" do final test. Yields of 90% weren't unusual. Low volume pricing for a part like this could be a dollar- quite a business. Its true value to the customer and solves his problem. It cost Maxim millions and millions to create the infrastructure required. Their reward is this long term business with 90% gross margins.As insane as the above is and what an amazing business it, it got weirder, way weirder over time. I'll get into this in the next installment where we get into Super Supervisors.Regards All.

author: jwet
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: February 05, 2025, 05:20:46 am
content: The Super Supervisor- Part 2 of 2There are a couple of paragraphs of groundwork to lead you into part 2. These super supervisors rose out of an idea mining system that I sort of invented at the time. The super supervisors were an early success that arose from this work. The methodology is interesting and probably still relevant today. Today's tools including AI could make this much more powerful but I think it illustrates the beauty of applications research, invention and business especially in semiconductors. Once the methodology is explained, the ideas that emerge are just sort of natural. I think its one of the wilder things that I was involved in my career.My original job at Maxim was as a Field Applications Manager for the Southwest US. In this job, I was to get our Field Apps program off the ground in the region, meet our customers by serving as their FAE and hire and train a half dozen guys as FAE's. Maxim was going through a transition from a representative based sales model to a direct sales model and FAE's were step 1. This isn't the job I wanted but it’s what was available and something that I could do. I had kind of an understanding that after I got this put together, I could work on something closer to new product selection, definition, business analysis and design interface.After about 2 years, I had accomplished these goals and was poking management about what might be next. I lived in San Diego, a gorgeous spot that I liked pretty well but it felt like it was getting crowded and expensive for a young family guy. My wife liked San Diego somewhat but was from the east coast and really wanted to get back there closer to family- we had two kids under 6 and things were moving fast. The default for this new job, would be in Silicon Valley and my wife and I sure as hell didn't want to move to the bay area, it had all the crowding and expenses of San Diego in spades without the beaches and the weather. Time for a bit of scheming- in this new job, I convinced myself and my boss that living on the east coast would be a better spot. I'd be closer in time to Europe and not a lot worse for Asia. I also agreed to cover the FAE needs in the Research Triangle Park area of NC, a fast-growing area where we were under represented- our closest FAE was in Florida. Somehow, I managed to convince everyone and Maxim even paid for the move. I knew though that I had to bring some extra special value to the company for all this accommodation.Maxim around 1995 was a funny company- they had no business infrastructure. It was like a big chaotic startup that was busting at the seams. Everything ran off of spreadsheets. Maxim was founded by engineers and grew at 30% per year since inception and there was no time for such fineries. My experience was working for two big well-organized companies that worked on Military and serious industrial stuff- Nuclear Power. My analog experience was in Nuclear Instrumentation for civilian nuclear power and Navy propulsion. There is an old joke that you could produce more power than a Nuke plant makes by just burning the documentation it takes to make one. I loved the analog problems inherent in these systems but it was a grinder with little future after 3 Mile Island. I liked both management styles, it was nice to be unfettered but it’s a hell of a way to run a business. Some of my value I thought was to bring some discipline to these guys that were obviously raised by wolves.In settling into my new job as a Corporate Applications Engineer- I thought my role could be to bring some structure to our new product research and planning. In my experience in fancy engineering management, I took courses and studied formal Systems Engineering and highly structured methods of functional deployment- invention. It was sort of a new topic that grew out of Mil-Std-499 and the TQM fad of the times. Quality function deployment is probably one of the least known but best parts of TQM- its a very effective way to identify needs. This was also a time when management tools like SAP, Oracle, SEER and Ingres were emerging. These would be too big a leap for Maxim, I thought Microsoft Access was an approachable tool, it could interface with Excel, etc. and didn't need a mini computer to run on. Relational databases really caught my imagination, the idea of having these linked tables that could be configured flexibly was genius though like most good inventions, it seems completely obvious now. The kind of insight it provided was something like magic to me.Maxim had about 50 FAE's worldwide after my and others efforts to build up this team as discussed above. Each made about 12 customer visits a week and were required to file a two or so page trip report for each visit. This meant that 600 reports per week were being faxed into Headquarters. Here they were copied to corporate apps, business management and anyone else that had a need. Every one that received them had this menacing pile growing in their office and would make a valiant but feeble attempt to peruse them on slow days which didn't happen ever. Few were ever read but they were too important to toss- this is one of those funny institutional insanities that go on everywhere. In looking at what I could do in my new role- I volunteered to take on this monstrosity. I would take over this monster. I would have them scanned on arrival- automated by a refrigerator sized networked fax machine. Their content would be available online. I would create a data base where I would read and summarize each report into a searchable relational database that could be searched by anyone, have key word triggers and some special sauce that I baked in so I could track emerging ideas. This isn't AI or anything but it’s a bit of a trade secret that I won't explain in detail. The concept is that a reader could create emergent themes that he could tag as he read the reports and this would be tracked and made searchable and these emergent needs would rise like cream to the top.When I got on distribution for the trip reports, I had a huge backlog of paper trip reports to read before I could settle into the steady state rate of 600/week that were electronic. At even a couple of minutes per trip report, this was a big job. I struggled in those first few months to get things going but I survived. The task was difficult to delegate at least infinitially, the topics were in every segment of Maxim's business and took a pretty experienced apps guy. Also, my data base was in an early alpha state in software lingo. After about a quarter of near burn out levels of work, I had a database with over 6000 records and had several small emergent themes bubbling up to the top. Once you saw the same theme a few dozen times, the database would flag things and the referenced trip reports and customers that supported that idea. It wasn't a new product itself, it was just a direction and gave strategic direction to business management and corporate apps on things worth noting. I was really proud of this thing- I gave a talk at a director's offsite about what it could do and those that understood it were stunned. The problem was sustainability- this thing was a cruel master and a burn out trap, I thought I could handle it for a year but had to figure out how to scale it. I was trying to justify my remote existence so I didn't mention these second order problems. I won't go into this much but if you ever get into this- figure out an exit strategy.There were several early themes that percolated out of the data base and were very rewarding. The first that I remember was called the "Single Li-Ion Buck Boost". Lithium-Ion cells have a voltage range of 4.2v down to 2.5v and most electronics wanted to have a 3.3V main supply. This is kind of a PIA, it’s not a boost, it’s not a buck, true 4 switch buck-boosts are messy and Cuk, Sepic and other topologies weren't popular. I think some of these topologies (Cuk) were still under patent. This trend should have been obvious to our business managers but it wasn't. It was the first significant work product of the data base and it showed me how things emerge. It’s kind of like a small signal emerging on a spectrum analyzer and gaining strength. It also showed how peaks could emerge and spread out into multiple peaks. It gave enough info for the factory to contact FAE's, contact customers, make some visits and get a real handle on this emerging area. This created a half dozen new product launches to cover the needs for different markets- the spectral peaks. There were products for tiny stuff like smart watches, medium stuff like MP-3 players, GPS, Cameras and Medical and finally of course cellular. Early phones often used a two-cell stack and this single cell architecture was a game changer but a lot technology was required to enable it- mainly low voltage PA's. The cell phone power took on a life of its own. These short lived but hyper hi-volume power ASICs produced billion of dollars of revenue for Maxim over many years. This wasn't all from the data base, the high volume wins were strategic customs, but some of the standard products that we did help create legitimacy when we started calling on Samsung and Nokia that showed we understood the problems and had good solutions.Finally- we get to the end of the story and the very coolest outputs that came out of the database- the "Super Supervisor". Early on in the trip report mining process, I saw these needs for elaborate supervision application problems. I flagged things that required more complexity than a standard supervisor could accomplish as discussed in Part 1. An early peak that showed up was dual voltage supervisors, this was first in mixed 3.3V/5V systems that were common but the peak widened and created needs for low voltage core 1.2v core, logic 2.5/3.3 and 5 for example. Often, these solutions brought in "sequencing" where the order of release and shutdown was important. Some of our networking and telecom customers had whole boards of analog and logic that were essentially supervision. PCs began to have super supervisors like the LM78 that had a bunch of comparators, ADC's, temp sensors, FAN monitor and margining control- all interfaced over I2C (SMBUS more precisely). Network guys had incredibly complex needs that were service by parts like the MAX6870, a DAC/Comparator wrapper around an FPGA that could handle these complex needs. Later peaks showed up in automotive with widely varying needs to monitor the main 12v input and a number of other supplies- these were some of Maxim's first automotive landmark parts. These splinted into specific solutions for infotainment for click and pop suppression and cold cranking applications, light hybrid or engine stop needs.. What finally started to emerge was what is now known as the battery management system for electric and hybrid vehicles. These application needs created isolated, networked, precision, monitoring and load balancing for large and small battery packs. Overall, this super supervisor idea grew into a billion dollars’ worth of Maxim business in 50 products and 10 markets and continues to this day. It’s amazing how these emergent ideas surface, come into focus and get serviced by a business operation that is paying attention.There is more to this story obviously but this was a lot and most of what I'm comfortable disclosing.Regards All and thanks for the attention-

author: schmitt trigger
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 06, 2025, 01:12:12 am
content: Jwet; what was your age when you developed this system?The reason I am asking is because, by your description, you were already old enough to have accumulated significant amounts of experience, yet you were still young enough to have the necessary energy and drive to accomplish what you described.My first order guess is between 35 and 45 years old.

author: jwet
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: February 06, 2025, 07:11:47 pm
content: I was born in '57- and this was around 93-97 so mid to late 30's, you got it. I had some great mentors and great experience in my 15 or so working years previous to Maxim. I also had kind of an unconventional education where I went to school for my first two years on a Navy scholarship, dropped out and spent two years as an tradesmen sailboat rigger and then went back to school to finish up my BSEE. I grew up as an electronics hobbyist kid and a sailor in a Navy brat family- we moved every year or two until I got to high school. It made me "unusual". At this time, I had two young kids and was a little paranoid about providing for my family with one income which is something my wife and I liked. You make an interesting observation.

author: Zucca
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: February 06, 2025, 07:43:13 pm
content: Thank me here if you want those stories in anamphourepisode.@Daveeeee set up something with Jwet and mawyatt!

author: tautech
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 06, 2025, 08:05:18 pm
content: Quote from: Zucca on February 06, 2025, 07:43:13 pmMike and Dave have already been in touch for Amphour.......tried to arrange exactly this a couple years back.

author: jwet
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: February 07, 2025, 09:49:51 pm
content: Schmidt Trigger- post reflection revision about having such diverse experience at a young age:After thinking about your comment a bit more- it also has to do with the FAE job itself and spending a few years looking at varied designs after having been deeply involved in some state of the art development- almost any kind. I was a pretty experienced designer and manager of complex industrial and military gear before Maxim. I had some pretty arcane and unusual knowledge about analog topics, just from reading, being a life long hobbyist and managing engineers. Most of electrical engineering in different domains isn't all that different once you learn a few little tricks about the architecture and how these systems go together. As an FAE, you get to see this huge variety of stuff, bounce questions off the designers and you get comfortable with a lot of applications. Customer engineers often really enjoy good FAE's, we could be like therapists- uniquely positioned to commiserate. Sr. Engineers had all this stuff they did daily, they couldn't tell their wives with any specificity, nor their co-workers- they were in the same soup. A decent FAE comes that isn't trying to sell, with some real curiosity and they very often really open up. I had meetings with customers that were supposed to be 30 minutes turn into half days with a dinner. Our sales guys were drooling and falling asleep while we talked nerd. The sales guys really didn't represent any value to the customer unless he was struggling to find a dozen parts for a proto or get a better price quote.I've never designed a notebook PC but after you've helped a dozen customers design state of the art ones and help them with bitchy problems, try to think of improvements, you get a lot of domain knowledge quickly. I still don't know if I could design a notebook but its not really a mystery. Way back when, as an active FAE, I likely knew more about these domains and where they were going than our customers who were doing it daily. Likewise with medical stuff, motor controls, set top boxes. I was always honest and complimentary with customers. I am genuinely extremely curious and once you build a bit of rapport they know you're a kindred spirit and have felt their kind of pain- they are usually incredibly open (not always- but often to their detriment). I can remember going into accounts with sales guys who said "this customer was a prick and very secretive", "don't expect much", etc. In a lot of cases, after an hour or two or after a couple of visits, we'd have the full set of schematics spread out over the table, have the BOM out with all our competitors parts and pricing and we were talking about his roadmaps for the next two revisions. It wasn't that they were secretive, it was that it was kind of fruitless talking to a non-technical guy- he would just nod. Maxim's FAE hiring was based on this, we tried to get guys with decent depth in some field with a good analog grounding. If they could talk, had enough energy to travel and make visits, it usually worked. Getting new product ideas was as important as selling for our FAE's, I would read trip reports for what we had lost of competitors and why as much as anything. Once the FAE identified what the customer needed, the sales guys could get him samples, quotes, etc. etc.There is a philosophical idea that I like that says there is only one truth but a thousand ways to observe it. If you're deeply into anything, you have a pretty good chance of understanding most other things. Its interesting to talk to people in diverse fields; its not hard with some decent probing to understand their problems and get a map of their personal hell. Its almost surprising to me how this works.

author: jwet
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: February 09, 2025, 04:18:29 am
content: Zucca/Tautech- I'm a fan of AmpHour- I listen to Dave and Chris have these discussions about the IC business and they really struggle to see the motivations of chip vendors- mostly digital ones, IP vendors, big CAE vendors, etc and even the tiers of super users like Qualcomm and STM, etc. Chris's take on RISC-V is almost conspiratorial- its usually really simple economics- they're free and it does put pressure on ARM of course but its not apples to apples- its business. They're also strategic reasons that these companies make the moves they do.Mike Wyatt has an amazing background and I love his stories- he has done foundational work on some of the sexiest IC Fabs in the world and has some great stories. I think he would be an awesome guest if the interview was done well. Dave might call me a "marketing wanker" and has some history with Maxim in their early 90's poor delivery days- I think he's admitted as much. I can't blame him- it sucked. I won't be holding my breath for the call but, I enjoy these reminisces for those that are curious. I think getting a solid guy with some real experience in the IC business would be good on AmpHour. Since the show bends toward microcontroller, IOT and Firmware, a senior guy from Microchip (i know he's had the CEO, but that's different), Atmel or Freescale/MOT might be good. It might be nice to get someone that has disassociated enough to give you the unvarnished story. Its a super interesting business that no one on the outside understands. Unfortunately or fortunately, the best guy might be a "marketing wanker" or a business director with a design background. Try to keep an open mind.Take care-

author: coppice
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 09, 2025, 02:18:37 pm
content: Yep, its amazing how heavily the group of engineers who chat on line skews towards people who have never shipped a million of something, and can't really grasp the dynamics of how high volume engineering works. Semiconductors is a great example. Nothing there works unless it ships by the million.

author: mawyatt
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 09, 2025, 03:43:05 pm
content: Back around 2000 we were in contact with Motorola R&D and the new development of GaAs on Si they were working on. Later Motorola formed Thoughtbeam to move forward to commercialize this new semiconductor technology.We meet with some Motorola Executives and Technical Staff in Phoenix and flew down to Austin where Thoughtbeam was and meet the Operations Manager and others. They showed off their new Si wafers with localized GaAs deposits and wanted to license this technology. Later when we began pushing for some test devices and such for evaluation Thoughtbeam seemed hesitant to provide any physical devices for evaluation, even individual GaAs FETs and Silicon CMOS or Bipolar devices of any kind.After a few follow on meetings and discussions we backed away fearing that something was being hidden, turns out Thoughbeam had all sorts of issues and problems and soon were closed down.They were using Strontium Nitrate as a thin film interface barrier between the GaAs and the Si wafer. This was similar (probably copied) to IBM techniques of depositing Ge onto Si wafers where the interfaces are stretched to allow crystal alignment, so built-in stress* IBM utilized Ultra High Vapor Deposition (UHVD) to selectively deposit the Ge onto the Si wafers.Thoughtbeam was using UHVD of Strontium Nitrate selectively onto Si wafers then following up with processing the GaAs devices onto these selective interface areas. We never found the total technical reasons, but suspected that they had issues with interface film adhesion, surface tension and post processing the GaAs devices.Later we moved on to GaN on Silicon, but that's another story* With IBMs successful development of depositing Ge onto Si wafers (SiGe BiCMOS), they developed a Strained Silicon CMOS where the Si crystal structure is selectively "strained" to improve the Mobility of the MOS FET Channel Carriers. We used to call these Strained Si FETs "Ballistic Transistors" as the Channel Carriers followed a more like Bullet-Down-A-Barrel rather than the traditional random Bouncing-Off-The-Walls of a conventional Channel CMOS FETs. This effect significantly improved (over 30%) the speed of the FET without additional drain current or other device changes in size/parameters/structure.Best

author: coppice
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 09, 2025, 05:46:29 pm
content: Motorola had quite a history of getting overexcited about semiconductor technologies which someone thought were close to market, but which never quite made it. I know of several projects which were based on "its time to start development of actual products with this, as we iron out the final kinks", only for the projects to fall apart near completion because the underlying technology failed to either work or be cost effective. In the early 90s we had fully working samples of GCMOS MCUs running at 0.9V, at pretty reasonable speeds, only for the work to fall into a black hole somewhere before market. That would have been a real winner in many single cell applications, if only it had proved viable. It was a long time before someone really got 0.9V MCUs performing any better than the slow devices people like Seiko made with watch processes.

author: mawyatt
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 09, 2025, 06:36:39 pm
content: At Honeywell back in the late 80s they were working on Sub-Threshold Logic for low power applications. We utilized this in the Floating Point SAR ADC developed back then which employed some of the 1st Capacitive Ratio 12 bit DAC also developed back then when Honeywell was doing all sorts of stuff with CMOS, including CCDs and Imagers.The IBM Cell Processor used in the Playstation 3 ran at ~1V at ~90A, we were briefed on it back in ~2003 I recall.Fun times indeed!!Best

author: coppice
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 09, 2025, 06:40:11 pm
content: Googling Thoughtbeam, it seems they actually got to the point of licencing their non-working technology to other people. E.g.https://www.eetimes.com/motorola-forms-unit-to-sell-gaas-on-silicon-wafers-licences-technology-to-iqe-of-uk/

author: Grandchuck
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 09, 2025, 08:13:16 pm
content: I was a consultant for a Westinghouse spin-off (the division was sold to Ebara) when they were developing dendritic web silicon solar cells. The idea was to grow long (over 5 meters), 5 centimeter wide, monocrystalline ribbons that were very thin (120 microns). It was an extremely fussy process and never did reach the production phase, as far as I know.Looking around one sees all the successes of semiconductor research. I'd bet that the percentage of ideas that come to a profitable fruition is rather small.

author: coppice
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 09, 2025, 08:37:24 pm
content: Quote from: Grandchuck on February 09, 2025, 08:13:16 pmOf course. If you aren't failing a lot, you are just sticking to the low hanging fruit. A well functioning research mix should combine a balance of low hanging fruit up to blue sky research. Philips used to estimate that fairly consistently over time 40% of their profits came from product types which did not exist 5 years before. Not the yearly refreshed models, but entirely new categories of product. You need a good balance of easy and hard research to sustain that kind of performance..... which Philips, sadly, eventually failed to do.

author: mawyatt
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 10, 2025, 01:52:27 pm
content: Recall a DARPA Program Manager saying if they were above 5% success rate on Advanced Research Projects, then they were not reaching far enough, thus the term "DARPA Hard!!".From what we've experienced with DARPA this seems correct.Best,