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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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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@Felthry

Some of Analog's still rock. I used this chip a few years ago and its datasheet kicked total ass. analog.com/en/products/ad9739.

@Felthry

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.

@Felthry

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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@Felthry

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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@Felthry

That is absolutely fucking wild. I did not know those crystals could be made to that. XD

@Felthry

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

@Felthry

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.

@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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@Felthry

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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Follow

@zetasyanthis it's really weird when you see magic smoke and then everything seems to be working perfectly! (as perfectly as it was before, anyway, what with the large quiescent current problem we were trying to pinpoint)
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