The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

A weekly show about the trends in the electronic industry.

You are here: Home / Radio Show / #102 — Gouging Green Gardyloo

#102 — Gouging Green Gardyloo

Play

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS

 

This week on the show we covered everything from energy to electronics. Some of the links go to the associated pages on The Discussion Server, but any page that has a link to an external site can be accessed at the title link at the top of that page.

 

Next week on the show, we’ll have Philip Freidin of Fliptronics. He was an architect of the RISC (AM29000) and Bit-Slice (AM2900/29300) products at AMD and FPGAs at Xilinx (XC4000, Virtex, Virtex2, Virtex4, Spartan).

Comments

      • This would be good if you could look into it although I suspect us in the UK/Europe won’t get the discount.

        The current price (for a physical copy) in the UK is 54 GBP (84 USD) per year.

        • Sent an email. I fear the same, because it’s likely a different distribution wing of the company. I would at least hope they’d get the discounted price for the digital version! Maybe I should let everyone use my address in the states? Imagine the junk mail!

  2. Hydrogen, Helium etc might be abundant elements in the cosmos but not accessible to earthlings. Thats why Helium is so expensive and we don’t use Hydrogen cells (we have to produce it by burning oil).

  3. Thanks for the discount on Circuit Cellar, just entered my subscription. Had wanted to subscribe earlier this year but the price is steep for a monthly magazine.

  4. Oddly enough, I just placed a (personal) order from PolyCase.
    Really easy to work with, prices are right there, and they ship fast with no extra email junk.
    The project, fyi, is in a wall wart enclosure, and they have a bunch of options. The projects job is to keep window fans from turning on if it is hotter outside than in. Easy peasy, hardest part was getting the power supply cheap and isolated since there is a thermistor that plugs into the box for outside temp sensing. Fixes something I have often been annoyed by about window fans.

  5. Nice show! I did love BlackMagic’s camera.
    I agree with you regarding outsourcing manufacturing for analog parts. Analog designers always talk about the “black magic” that is involved when trimming the manufacturing process of highly specialized analog parts…
    Sad news about Renesas… They are huge players on the market, but I wonder if their strength is too concentrated in the auto industry, which may have been suffering a bit more with the recent economy downturns.
    The BQ prefix was used by the Benchmarq product line (part of Unitrode, acquired by TI ages ago). It is currently used to denominate parts that are correlated to their old product line (battery / cell management).

    • Ah, thanks! I was wondering about that, I had never seen that particular prefix before (the BQ). With a conglomerate like TI, it’s tough to remember which products came from where outside of the part number/name prefixes (LM, INA, OPA, BQ, etc)

      • Yep, that is hard to track… The other ones I know are UC/UCC (Unitrode), PT (PowerTrends, part of Unitrode), INA/OPA/BUF/PGA/ISO/ADS/XTR/DIR (BurrBrown), CC (Chipcon), LM*.* (some TI and now zillions from NSC), TL/TLV/TSC/T*.* (all TI)…
        Well, I guess that after 10+ years since some of these acquisitions took place, we can consider that any new design is definitely 100% TI… 🙂

    • Ah, so BQ is short for for Benchmarq! I had always assumed it was B as in battery and Q as in the symbol for charge.

  6. About analog companies using smaller fab processes.

    I listened to a talk from Marcel Pelgrom from NXP last year about the challenges for the future. They we’re working on a AD-converter for software defined television reception. The ADC goes from 1 MHz. to 1 GHz. at 14 bits. The only way to do this, is to create a direct conversion AD-converter

    The biggest challenge for this kind of IC’s remains the repeatability. Every comparator for the AD converter needs to remain identical to the next one. All 2^14 ones. Otherwise your non-linearity across the voltage domain or in time domain becomes too large. So every comparator needs to have the same dimensions as the other one.

    The cells themselves aren’t that small as 180 nm. The traces still remain up to micrometers wide. But the resolution at which you etch them, to get them all the same has to go to 180 or even 90 nm.

    Also with the software defined television, you go to the digital domain just after your input ADC. Which off course benefits from the higher resolution of 180 nm.

    • Yes, the mixed media type of stuff is a difficult problem. You either trade off at the process level or at the packaging level by tying two die together. The point about the actual feature size is another good one: the stated size is the smallest feature on the chip, often the gate width of a single transistor.

  7. Just for your information von the “Carbon Tax/Fee” topic.

    GERMANY has a Carbon Tax for ages already. I’m not sure how many years now, but I even think – and can imagine – it was the first country to introduce it.

    Energy costs have increased since the carbon tax was implemented. But mainly for other reasons. Especially since Fukushima and Germany’s decision to quite all nuclear power plants till 2020 and having already shut down a couple or so, which has deeply affected Germanies Energy supply capabilities.

    The surge in renewable energy sources is incredible. If plans work out the way they should – which they never -, but even IF with a 10 year delay, Germany will be very energy independant from fossile fules in 30-40 years time with the hardliner ecological laws at the moment.

    Welcome Australia to the Club of sensible nations.

  8. Oxygen is third most abundant element in the universe and then carbon and these are formed mostly within stars.