September 2007

• ASICs are for only very big companies, or for products which have a long product life cycle. for a small company in consumer electronics it is not good, because by the time you get the ASIC out the product model is obsolete.
• For low volume production use FPGA or CPLD, or even flash based microcontrollers, so that all your inventory can be reused and recycled, only change the software. but for say cell phones or a LAN card ASIC is fine. Volumes are good in cell phones and for lan cards the technology is matured.
• Whatever the method keep design flexible and modular for reuse and to save cost. remember the hardware is difficult to alter, software can be altered even at customer site, flash has made this possible
• In the future chips will be both analog and digital programmable with flash, and all the stores will have is blank chips. do not end up with too much inventory which is not good for the environment and is useful in only land fills.
• Some FPGA, CPLD, ASIC links, WinCUPL, Design and Reuse, fpga4fun.

• If a product gives three years life with minimum service support it can save itself from building a bad reputation. six years will establish the brand on a long term basis, twelve years of product life you will have the user of the product selling for you. if you want to improve sales by giving a new model every three years, you will need a lot of innovation on the product and you need to buy back the old ones for a big discount, you can bear some cost for brand loyalty and hence build a reputation for more sales in the future. This implies proper and sensible investments in product design and development, engineering, reliability, standards and quality will help a company survive long term.

If Inputs are Distorted, The Outputs are Noisy.
Even if the Amplifier is Very Good.

If Raw Materials are of Poor Quality, The Finished Goods are Defective.
Even if the Process and Machinery is State Of The Art.

If the Specifications are incomplete, The Prototype will be rejected.
Even if the Design and Tools are Perfect.

Solderman - 1707 AD

• This circuit of delabs has mistakes. 4A charger PWM, pdf in Power Electronic Circuits U2C must be a buffer not an inverter or swap pins 10 and 9 of U1C then only it will oscillate. Circuit File Name ST10_1.pdf .
• This circuit of delabs has mistakes. Errata-2, +5/-5 dual supply from 12V DC, pdf Power Electronic Circuits 7905 regulator Input and Output lines to be swapped. use 79L05 for low current. Circuit File Name dact0017.pdf.
• A Temperature Controller was fixed in a PCB manufacturer’s Works, The readings was fluctuating and soon stopped working properly, the service engineer went and found that there was a strong smell of ammonia around the unit. When opened the tracks were eaten away by rapid corrosion and some of the component leads had disappeared. So another controller was made with extra coats of lacquer-varnish all over and RTV compound in many places. That solved the problem.
• In above real life example, If production quantities were required then you need to vacuum impregnate modules in epoxy resin. These reworks or fixes will add rapidly to the BOM bill of Materials Cost. Then cost of fixing. So customers are of five types home-user, industrial, hazardous, military and medical. So Components are to be selected and product engineered and costed accordingly in that order.
• If you put the DMM in 2V mode and measure the voltage across a ordinary LED near a 40W lamp you will see around 200mV. Turn off 40W lamp the mV will fall near 0. Even metal-can transistors with their top ground away will become photo sensors.
• When you measure low voltages or high resistance like 1M with a DMM your body must not be in contact with the probe tips. Body resistance is low in comparison so error in reading or loading of mV from sensor, in sensitive and high impedance ranges.