μblog: engineering from the trenches

This is some sort of processor from a Motorola handset from about 2002-2004. Still don’t have a datasheet for it but here it is.

m79e71-4x-stitched.jpg

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For one reason or another, both of the shift keys suddenly stopped working on June’s VAIO notebook. After some troubleshooting it seemed to be a hardware problem. With work needing to be done, I didn’t want to open the machine up and risk breaking more things so I thought that it would be easiest to remap the shift key to the caps lock key, one that shouldn’t be used too often. While it is straightforward to change this on a Unix/Linux system (xmodmap, loadkeys, etc), it turns out that there is also a straightforward method to do this on Windows. This requires editing the registry, however, the Windows Resource Kit has a nice graphical front-end to do this.  The installed tool is called remapkey.exe and has a drag and drop configuration screen. Long story short, the caps lock key is now the shift key, and everything is fine until tomorrow.

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I had spent some time yesterday at a NIH grantsmanship seminar so here is a small digest.

Firstly, the NIH is split up into 24 administrative units/institutes each of whom have their own individual budgets and fund their own grants. Although NIH has standardized grants (F, K, R, P series), their funding criteria and value different from institute to institute. For this reason, it is paramount to have your grant sent to the appropriate institute for consideration after it is reviewed by the Center for Scientific Review. It is highly recommended that those who are planning to submit a grant contact a program officer in the individual institute to discuss the scope of the grant to make sure that it complies with the activities of the institute. If not, the program officers can typically recommend a better place to submit your grant. Below are a few useful links.

• Neuroscience research funding contacts in the federal government
• Federal grants clearing house
• NIH program announcements and requests for applications
• “All about grants“
• NIH grant writing tips
• Quick guide for grant applicants

The image above is of gold ore taken from USGS mineral resources program.

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My flight from Kiev, Ukraine left 70 minutes late causing me to miss my connecting flight to Washington D.C., USA and necessitating an overnight stay in Frankfurt, Germany. Although this is poor for my schedule, it gives me an opportunity to catch up on many fronts by giving me the first access to high speed internet in two weeks. In Yalta, Ukraine, there is only dialup. Also I was able to visit the duty-free shops and get something good to drink and eat. In terms of pictures from my vacation, I am going to post a set of pictures from the Balaklava nuclear submarine base. June may post some pictures relating to Crimean fashion and the use of fake goods. Finally, I have a few ideas for IC Friday: CMOS op-amp, CMOS diff-amp or a recent north-bridge controller from Intel. Please post comments if you feel strongly on the matter. Lastly, below are some pictures of a new family member.

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This week we have the X9250 from Intersil. This is a SPI-programmable quad potentiometer. The one imaged is 100kOhm total resistance. This unit is responsible for the gain and offset control in my digitally-programmable amplifiers and has done a fairly good job so far. It should be noted that the device can read out the wiper positions and has non-volatile storage. Finally, the maximum current limit for the device is 15mA through the wiper which may be lower than a comparable mechanical potentiometer.

( x9250ts.pdf )

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This week we have the TLV2374, quad CMOS op-amp, from TI. I am posting this some time in advance so I hope this gets published on time.

( tlv2374.pdf )

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This week we have a low power difference amplifier from Burr-Brown/TI: the INA132. The number of devices is relatively low so one could potentially think about drawing out a circuit diagram. It should be noted how much space is given to on-chip resistors and where the laser trimming has occurred for device matching.

( ina132.pdf )

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I am going to Yalta, Ukraine for two weeks to visit my parents and to enjoy the beaches. The obvious result is that there won’t be too many posts until I return on the 27th of August. I have already imaged the next three chips for IC Friday and will queue them up with Wordpress for routine publication. The chips will be the INA132, TLV2374 and X9250TC. These are a diff amp, quad op amp and a programmable potentiometer respectively. Otherwise, there may be a few pictures posted since I may have limited internet access. If anyone wants postcards from Yalta, send me an email with “Postcard” somewhere in the title and your address somewhere in the body.

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Jonathan Schwartz recently made a post in his blog about Sun entering the “commodity silicon” market. He also mentioned that the design for the UltraSparc T2 (Niagara 2) will be released to the open source community under the GPL. Although this is a step in a good direction, there are some potential dangers. The key to success in such a strategy is to provide a truly good product since everybody can see the details of the design. It would be unfortunate if there was some bug which allowed privilege escalation at a hardware level (remember having to run the older UltraSparcs in 32-bit mode to prevent some security problems?). Over all, this move puts Sun in a stronger position and I hope they do well. I can’t wait to see the actual design files.

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With RFID-type devices becoming more and more ubiquitous in our society, it is good to know some of the advances being made in the security research fields so as to avoid a false sense of security. I came across Jonathan Westhues‘ site which outlines his experiences duplicating certain identification devices. It is important to note that the duplicated devices are of the identification-only type and do not have any built in security mechanisms, however, these are accessible initial steps. Hopefully this will motivate me to do something with the TMS3705A-based RFID reader I built following a sample design.

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