apparently Analog bought Maxim recently
huh
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kind of sad that a lot of iconic electronic companies are now subsidiaries of other companies
like fairchild is now owned by onsemi, LT is now owned by Analog, burr-brown is now owned by TI, international rectifier is now owned by infineon,...
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I drive past the old SMSC HQ down here that Microchip bought. Always a little sad about that, as I loved their chips. (Granted, they're still made, but it's not the same...)
Also, the Microchip -> Microsemi -> Adaptec -> 3COM chain. O.o;
@zetasyanthis Microchip seems to be in the process of turning from a respectable company into a company that just keeps buying other companies, much like Vishay did
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@zetasyanthis they also bought Atmel, too
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Oh fuck, I forgot for a minute. That one I'm still mad about. Loved my ATMEGAs, and that's looking to peter out. :(
@zetasyanthis I think the internet would show up with torches and pitchforks if they ever dared to discontinue the atmega328p
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Yeah, just a bit. :P
If for nothing else I love the Atmel lines for having a free gcc compiler. Some of the shit Microchip, etc, try to sell is obscenely priced.
@zetasyanthis from talking to coworkers who used to work at microchip, microchip's internal structure is an absolute *mess* of meddling middle management resulting in all kinds of nonsense
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Fun fact. I almost went to work for them twice, but turned down both offers in the end. :P
Yeah, it's a bit wild to see. PCIe Gen 5 redrivers are a bit of a far cry from 8 bit micros. :P
Oh, and Intel with Altera! I almost forgot that one. Really glad Xilinx didn't get nabbed (yet?). :/
Some of Analog's still rock. I used this chip a few years ago and its datasheet kicked total ass. https://www.analog.com/en/products/ad9739.html
And yes, that /is/ a 2.5 GSPS 14 bit DAC. :D
@zetasyanthis what is even the use case for that
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@zetasyanthis i get needing ADCs that fast but DACs??
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Lots of things. DOCSIS to your cable modem, for one. Cell towers, satalite communications, etc...
Can run it in 1st, 2nd, or 3rd nyquist, too, and get out usable signals to 3.75GHz with the right filters.
If you need a fast ADC to receive on one end you need a fast DAC on the other end to transmit. :P
@zetasyanthis I'm thinking of ADCs for oscilloscopes, not for receiving transmitted data
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@zetasyanthis we're a test engineer, we don't work with *functional systems*!
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So am I believe it or not. I just test very different things (servers nowadays, actually). XD
@zetasyanthis speaking of, did you see our thread on hotspotting the other day? Seems like stuff you'd find interesting
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I did not! Link?
That is absolutely fucking wild. I did not know those crystals could be made to that. XD
@zetasyanthis we didn't either until a week or two ago!
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Also, now I have to tell you that one of the power supplies at my second internship was named the 'tracebreaker' for similar reasons. You took boards with a short, and it would find them for you, ideally with the thermal camera, but it was a 30A linear job... :P
Bonus: I once had a board it couldn't find the problem with! Turns out the PCB and assembly house both fucked up and managed to skip e-test on a set of boards. This one had one corner under a large connector just... not etched. Confused the hell out of us until I hacked the thing off to find out what was under it.
Double bonus: I once accidentally made a board that passed all the tests, but had like 20A of current slated to pass between the pads of an 0805. This caused a bit of ground ripple for the thermocouple amp also on the board, even though it was semi-isolated. :P
Since that was a prototype, I ended up scraping some solder mask off on both sides of a ground plane, drilling a hole in the board, and punching in an aluminum rivet (with a little solder for proper connection). Problem solved. Rev B board fixed it. :P
@zetasyanthis while we were trying to figure out how to use the hotspotting technique with liquid crystal, we thought we'd killed a die when we saw smoke coming up from it... the liquid crystal went completely black over the entire surface, too. but it was working perfectly fine afterward, somehow
when cleaning up at the end of the day, it turned out that there was a perfect black rectangle in the cardboard we'd used to keep the liquid crystal from getting all over the probe station
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I do not quite follow. Was the cardboard on the die?
@zetasyanthis the die was sitting on the cardboard, so that liquid crystal spilling off the edge wouldn't get into the vacuum system (intended to hold wafers down)
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@zetasyanthis we don't really have a proper setup for working on individuated dice right now
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Ah, yeah, that'd do it. :P
@zetasyanthis there's a 750 volt, 40 amp power supply in our coworker's lab
we have no idea what they're doing with it, but it's a Lot
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especially bad that Linear used to have some of the best datasheets anyone ever made, and Analog's just aren't the same
at least they did keep the old Linear ones
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