μblog: engineering from the trenches

I have been very busy at the lab lately, too busy to update ublog regularly, and this set of formulas from Gamma Instruments has saved me a bit of trouble. Several air core inductor designs are outlined which allow you to make your own custom inductor, within reason, if you need to test something and you don’t have the part on hand. Typically, the inductance values will be modest, however, it is much easier to make an inductor yourself than a reasonable capacitor. Just think of all of the folding!

( pancakewheel )

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I have many AS and LS series logic gates lying around, so I figured that I would image some as they would be more instructive than looking at the latest CPUs coming out of Intel. I have a few more lined up so please comment if you want me to follow this reasoning. Today’s subject is a hex-inverter, the 74AS04. Below are images of the whole chip and a blowup of the top-right inverter gate.

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Now that I have everything unpacked, the IC Friday program can resume. Today’s a nSpire processor sent in by Travis Goodspeed. Two notes of interest are the prominent LSI LOGIC badging and the dual CHIPIDEA cores. The model number looks like CI12320, but that is not listed on their page.

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Today’s IC Friday is another reader-submitted chip. This is cryptoworks six-pin smartcard. The only writing on it is “TUBEAV A”.

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Today’s entry is an old memory chip from Mitsubishi, the M5K4164. This is another chip submitted by a reader, again, all the way from Iceland.

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Today’s IC Friday entry is the 8bit AVR micro from Atmega. This chip was sent in by a reader, all the way from Iceland.

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Found the NASA Workmanship Technical Committee website recently while looking at ESD standards. Not much to say about it beyond that it is a good place to look around for general technical information on electronics. Their pictorial inspection reference for examining flight hardware is pretty nice too.

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This weeks entry is the 20-bit delta-sigma DAC from TI.

dac1220-10x-stitch.jpg

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Today’s entry is the LMC6042 dual-op amp from National Semiconductor. The layout of this device is a bit different from a standard op-amp due to the inclusion of some periodic components. It can also be noted that this die is mostly the same as the LMC6044 except that the two op-amps on the bottom-right side of the chip don’t have most of the metal deposited.

lmc6042-10x-stitch.jpg

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This weeks entry is the INA2143 differential amplifier from Texas Instruments. This is a dual diff-amp and the partitioning is pretty apparent. It is also apparent that most of the device is constructed using a bi-polar process, which matches well with the decreased quiescent current with increased temperature in the datasheet.

ina2143-10x-stitch.jpg

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