Signetics announced the NE555 timer/oscillator IC in 1972, 50 years ago. Over five decades, this simple 8-pin chip has consistently sold in the billions, each year. It’s a perennial hobbyist favorite. Well-known authors such as Walter Jung wrote 555 timer cookbooks, and 555 circuits have been popular for new circuit designs since the 1970s. Engineering acceptance has been mixed. Some engineers routinely put 555 chips in their circuits. Others view the 555 timer IC as a somewhat sloppy way to create an oscillator or a timer. However, the 555 IC’s success cannot be denied. They’re everywhere. There are even … Read More → "Happy 50th Birthday to the Signetics 555 Timer IC"
If you are anything like me, you dream of having the ability to create and automatically populate your printed circuit board (PCB) prototypes in the comfort of your own office. Well, in fact you can, because BotFactory’s SV2 combines a conductive ink printer, solder paste extruder, pick-and-place machine, and reflow bed into a single product that allows you to prototype your PCBs in a matter of minutes.
I’m starting to feel like an old fool (but where can we find one at this time of the day?). A … Read More → "BotFactory: All-In-One PCB Printing and Assembly"
Perhaps you recognize the name TomTom. It’s a Dutch company, founded in 1991. The company’s original name was Palmtop Software, and the company specialized in software for handheld computers, also known as Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), like the Psion family and Windows CE devices. As that market dwindled, the company pivoted to location technology based on GPS. Adopting a new name and mission, TomTom introduced its first maps for PDAs in 2002 and a portable GPS navigation unit, the TomTom Go, in 2004. I bought a later GPS model, a TomTom One, just a few years later. … Read More → "Will Carmakers Adopt TomTom’s IndiGO Open, Integrated Digital Cockpit Software Platform?"
This is not my original first-of-the-year story for 2022. I wrote a different story about difficulties I had installing a specific manufacturer’s networked all-in-one printer in my daughter’s new business location. I spent hours trying to make that printer work and had endless problems in getting the overly finicky software to function. In the end, we shipped the printer back and I bought another for my daughter – a much more expensive printer, a $280 Epson EcoTank ET-4800 printer, purchased locally at Target.
Epson’s EcoTank printers dispense with the tiny, … Read More → "Stay Curious. Stay Humble. Stay Connected."
Have you heard that the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), which produces globally applicable standards for Information and Communications Technology (ICT), recently launched a new Industry Specification Group on Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (ISG RIS)?
There’s no need to hang your head in shame if this is new news to you. To be honest, I didn’t even know that ICT was an abbreviation for “information and communications technology” until now (well, I’m sure I knew it once, but it’s easy to lose the thread if you don’ … Read More → "Welcome to a World of Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces"
As I discussed in my Its vs. It’s column, which appeared a couple of months ago here on EEJournal, one of my back-burner hobby projects is writing a book called Wroting Inglish: The Essential Guide to Writing English for Anyone Who Doesn’t Want to be Thought a Dingbat.
I was originally planning on offering this … Read More → "Good-For-Nothing Grammarians"
As discussed in Parts 1 through 4 of this article series, the earliest PLDs evolved along easily traced genetic lines that started with Harris Semiconductor’s programmable diode arrays from the 1960s and progressed through bipolar PROMs, the Signetics 82S100 FPLA, MMI’s PALs, and finally the transcendent CMOS replications of PAL devices created by Altera and Lattice Semiconductor. By contrast, FPGAs (called “Logic Cell Arrays” in the first press release) came from a similar concept, field-programmable logic, but from an entirely different direction.
While working at microprocessor pioneer Zilog … Read More → "How the FPGA Came To Be, Part 5"
I’ve recently been chatting with folks from Synopsys and Concertio, and now my head is so full of “stuff” regarding things like hyper-convergent chip design, reliability analysis, real-time performance optimization, and silicon lifecycle management that I don’t know whether I’m coming or going.
I’ve told this tale before (and I’ll doubtless tell it again), but when I worked on my first digital ASIC design circa 1980 at International Computers Limited (ICL) in Manchester, England, the only design tools I had at my disposal were pencils, paper, … Read More → "When Reliability Analysis Meets Silicon Lifecycle Management"
By the end of the 1970s, PALs had become the PLD (programmable logic device) of choice for system designers. They were an immensely successful product for Monolithic Memories Inc (MMI). They were also a great target for every other IC maker that wanted to enter the PLD arena. Several did just that.
Bob Hartmann co-founded Source III in 1980. The consultancy specialized in the design of gate arrays, because the early 1980s was definitely a golden time for gate-array development. The major gate-array vendors of … Read More → "How the FPGA came to be, Part 4"
