Re: Ever heard of Potato Semiconductor?

On Jul 9, 2:52 am, "Joel Koltner" <zapwireDASHgro...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi Bill,

<bill.slo...@xxxxxxxx> wrote in message

<snip>

"Most of these schemes were quicker and easier
than the procedure suggestred by the original designers, but had a
painful tendecy to force the integrated circuits involved to operate
outside their guaranteed voltage or current ranges."

That's always a bit dicey, although sometimes it might make sense to
characterize the ICs yourself to ascertain how much "margin" there is in the
specs.  (E.g., if you're running your tests at 20C, clearly the IC will be
able to perform much better than the worst case specs that apply over the
entire temperature range.)

They were more than a little dicey. We'd find out about the new
schemes when the technicians would complain that some boards couldn't
deliver the specified output swing or bandwidth - so the board hadn't
been designed properly - and we'd have to dig a bit to find out that
they were using a new and innovative setting up procedure which didn't
work on every board. Going back to the original setting-up procedure
fixed the problem every time.

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen
.