Zero FIXMEs--BEOS 3rd Ed is about ready to send in

Hi, All,

Various folks have been asking me about progress on the third edition of "Building Electro-Optical Systems: Making It All Work".

Just now I nailed my last remaining FIXME, so apart from a careful read-through of a printed copy, I'm done on my end. I'll be sending sections to various folks here and elsewhere to ask for their critiques.

(Volunteers welcome--send me a PM at snipped-for-privacy@electrooptical.net.)

I expect to be able to get the responses folded into a final submission to Wiley by the end of the year.

The book contains a fair amount of stuff that I learned in the course of thrashing stuff out on SED, so thanks to all.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs 
Principal Consultant 
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Reply to
Phil Hobbs
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I think you may have just suffered from the Osborne effect, as I will now hold off my purchase. The only way you can redeem this situation is to tell me about all of the excellent content you had to remove from the new edition, so that then I have to buy both.

Oh, and I've just missed the deadline to tape out a high-bandwidth digital pot on skywater's 0.13um CMOS. Installing the open source tools took me 90% of the available time. I then found the learning curve for MAGIC very steep indeed, and the user interface quite medieval, (and I am giving it the benefit of a lot of doubt, due to my accumulated hatred of Cadence). I think KLayout might be more usable in the long run, though I hear that the DRC rules and the generators for the device layouts still need doing for that one. For schematics, xschem is very nice, though there is some intermittent bug (in debian?) that prevents it from getting correct mouse coordinates when a keyboard event happens, when run in a qemu VM on my machine. Maybe I will get these things sorted out in time for their next free shuttle, though by then more other people will have figured out the tools, so it might be oversubscribed.

Reply to
Chris Jones

Oh, darn, another $10 down the drain. ;)

How fast was it going to be? The quickest one I know of is the 1-k version of the AD5273, which is about 6 MHz at half-scale. You can get MDACs up to 10-12 MHz, e.g. AD5432, AD5452, and DAC881, but that's all she wrote.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs 
Principal Consultant 
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Reply to
Phil Hobbs

I'll have a go at simulating it, though I don't yet trust the models. It might take me a few days or more to get around to it. I'm guessing without trying too hard, it would be in the low hundreds of MHz.

If you have *lots* of spare time, you can also have a go, as there is a lot of opportunity to improve performance by changing the topology to suit your specific needs. I'd suggest using only NMOS switches, since the wiper could stay near ground in your cloud nine circuit. It might be worth figuring out some trick to use fewer switches/taps on the resistor string than the resolution would imply, e.g. by somehow dorking a resistor at one end of the string, or finding a way to make each switch not have to be big enough to deal with the total current, e.g. by feeding the current into several taps simultaneously. Also, using some sort of force / sense arrangement with two wipers may help.

Here are links to information:

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Here are some instructions/scripts for installing tools (including some you won't need/want) (tested with Ubuntu 20.04, I gave the VM a 60GB disk and it needed much of that):

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Reply to
Chris Jones

We use analog multipliers to simulate things like eddy-current blade tip sensors and oil debris sensors.

We use DAC8812 in a capacitor simulator, serial data and 10 MHz ref bandwidth. I think most MDACs have different bandwidth for different bits.

--
John Larkin      Highland Technology, Inc 

The best designs are necessarily accidental.
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jlarkin

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