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Back to normal this week but no shortage of electronics to talk about!
- Dave was dismayed by the combination of sexism and insulting engineers in advertising.
- Chris was dismayed by how fast (technology related) disinformation can be spread without any regard for details or fact.
- Chris and Dave were both interested in some of the test equipment around the labs in The Avengers (link via @HilaryLustig).
- LeCroy was bought out by Teledyne.
- Chris thinks the same thing will happen as it does in other industries: Companies like Oscium (the iPhone/iPad scope company) will have bottom-up innovation and overtake the larger players.
- Dave is trying out 3rd party manufacturing and selling for non-Aussie sales of the uCurrent.
- Ian of Dangerous Prototypes recaps his MFBA talk about the different options electronics companies have for selling their product
[tube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifTaGRTPwLc[/tube] - The USB Power Supply on Kickstarter was announced around the same time as Dave announced his USB power supply. Should Dave try and get his on Kickstarter as well? What are the marketing implications?
- A second version of the IOIO was announced, even after being superseded by the Android Development Kit (ADK).
- 4 bit micros still exist and are designed into consumer products, such as the one that Dave found in his Braun toothbrush, the EM6682 by EM MicroElectronic
[tube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJgKfTW53uo[/tube] - The Zed Board is a development board for the newly release Zynq7000 from Xilinx. It’s a dual core A9 with logic wrapped around it…but who can afford to design it into a product?
- Chip(s) of the Week!
- The LT5400 is a set of high quality matched resistors from Linear Tech.
- Texas Instruments now sells matched nexFETs in their PowerBlock packaging.
- Linear Tech just announced the LTC4359, an ideal diode control chip.
- The TPD1E6B06 is an ESD diode, likely one that TI pulled out of its IP bag.
Thanks to Alvaro for the pictures of the resistors!
I had the most amazing spike on my blog and was wondering what had caused it. I’m guessing that it was being mentioned here. Thanks for linking and I hope that you found it useful!
I haven’t had time to listen to the show yet so, if there’s something lurking in there, I’ll have to comment on that later.
Hi Nick
Yeah, that would be us. I mentioned your blog post on that bra advertisement. Saw the billboard myself, and searched for an image of it and your site came up. I rant about this silly billboard on the show this week.
Dave.
LeCroy doesn’t own Hameg. R&S owns Hameg. Dave should know, he did an interview at an Australian tradeshow once.
Ah, thanks Herman. I thought that sounded wonky. Is R&S still independently owned?
Rohde & Schwarz is still family owned by the descendants of the founders Rohde and Schwarz.
I hear Dr. Ulrich Rohde on the air (ham radio) from time to time.
Yes, I should have known that. I had a niggling feeling I was wrong. Brain fart.
Yeah it would be quite good if you posted a few bits every week as a sort of a buildup to the show.
It is a shame I really wanted a uCurrent from Australia. Will we still have the option of ordering internationally?
On the issue of phones. The limitations on interfacing has more to do with phone companies not wanting people to be able to talk to their network directly. Even android phones have a second processor just for talking to the network that runs it’s own closed source firmware.
I will no longer be directly shipping uCurrent’s overseas, as I’m experimenting with how much better/worse it is using a third party to do this.
In this case, it is Adafruit, I will be shipping a bunch of units to them today and they will handle all international sales.
Ok. Thanks.
Chris,
Dave is right; the middle-man usually takes a big chunk of the dough… I am based on the fact that several corporate distributors (Arrow, Avnet, etc.) are larger than most of the semiconductor manufacturers.
Compare this:
http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4199228/2010-top-25-global-distributors-item-1
To this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiconductor_sales_leaders_by_year
However, in consumer market (like BestBuy) the pressure is a lot different than in B2B, where price alone is the determining factor and the online offerings are really eating up their margins…
4-bit micros are still very present in the ubiquitous infrared remote controls for consumer products. Nothing seems to beat them in price…
The TI’s MOSFETs were part of a company called Ciclon (acquired in 2009). Check: http://investor.ti.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=364779
Although not simple diodes, TI always had a small line of transient suppressors: the SN652xx/SN752xx family.
Don’t confuse sales (revenue) with profit. That 16.6 billion? They made 100 million in profit. That’s pretty crappy. Chip companies are low margin too, but still.
Yes, you are right; revenue does not indicate profit. However, Avnet still had a pretty hefty gross profit in ’10 (around $2B according to their Investor Relations site); although smaller than some manufacturers, it is still a big chunk of the dough… 🙂
Oh wow, that’s a good year. I had only seen the more recent numbers.
Wow, were they that bad recently? Man…
BTW, I love your podcast! I started with episode seventy-something and have been listening backwards since then (I am at #43). It is great to see how it evolved since the earlier days.
Watch out…it keeps getting worse as you go backwards! 🙂
Hey Chris,
I’ve worked for a company making some accesories and its true, that chip you have to buy sucks, they even have to approve what you are making to be able to buy the chip… Seriously, that’s control… Fo nrow I’ll stick with Android. Apple’s policy is a dictatorship!
I lived in a small town where the city fathers were extremely excited that the town had grown so big that they had to have a SINGLE traffic signal……………
And, of course, a speed camera………. It went through a roll of film a week, mostly on visitors. Us locals knew to slow down at the speed limit change.
Teledyne… dyne… sounds like CyberDyne. We’ll all be terminated ™ by bad DSO firmware.
Regarding your question about more content. If it’s original content, why not.
News items that are already everywhere else. No thanks 🙂
Every smartphone has a great interface for getting at the data. It’s the Wifi connection. Just put a FTP server on your phone and you can access the data. It’s fast but unfortunately not real time.
Getting your app to directly talk to your phone hardware in an open way remains much harder. The IOIO is a step in the right direction for this.
Regarding the Xilinx Zynq 7000: I have the impression that Chris doesn’t know that FPGAs with hardcore processors have been available for a long time, e.g. the Virtex-II Pro with a Power PC 405 (this was 2003/2004).
Thought I had said, “They’re trying it again”. I meant to, at least. I knew about them trying it the first time (and it flopping).
How would a company calibrate a 100 Ghz scope?
Explanation for the lack of women engineers.
http://work.failblog.org/2012/05/18/job-fails-a-mystery-of-epic-proportionalities/
About more content on this site, maybe list and shortly discuss the topics that you could not cover on the previous episode (not the next) due to lack of time.
Regards to all, CH!
Best laugh! “… two levels, up and down! ” CH!