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From: John Larkin on 16 May 2010 11:44 On Sun, 16 May 2010 06:05:49 -0700 (PDT), Bill Sloman <bill.sloman(a)ieee.org> wrote: >The digital stroboscopic electron beam tester was canned after we'd >built a working prototype - the problem was that we would have needed >to sell 18 over about eighteen months to get the necessary cash flow, >and the original marketing estimates turned out to have been about 50% >too high. It didn't help that the original marketing specification had >included an irrational demand that we should be able to place our >500psec wide sampling pulse with a precision of 10psec, which meant >that the timing electronics had to be built around Gigabit Logic's >GaAs parts, making the development a little more demanding than it >needed to have been (not that we ran into many unanticipated problems >with the ultra-fast bits of the circuit). > The GBL parts were fabulously expensive, and weren't long for this world anyhow. Tek was making sampling scopes ca 1968 that had 10 ps resolution and jitter, using all discrete transistors. Heck, the HP185, around 1962, managed about that good with tubes. 10KH ECL is fine for 10 ps timing. I cleaned out our library before we moved a few years ago, and tossed a VW-sized dumpster worth of datasheets and databooks, including the GBL databook. Pity, I should have kept that one. I still have one of their samples, a $150 pin driver thing. Hittite is sort of repeating that pattern: very fast, high power dissipation simple gates and comparators, made from exotic materials, very expensive. I haven't bought any so far. Betting the farm on one product is dangerous. Our approach is to design a lot of products every year and accept that some will sell and some won't, and survive on the ones that sell. That means that they all have to be turned around fast. John
From: Bill Sloman on 16 May 2010 14:52 On May 16, 5:44 pm, John Larkin <jjlar...(a)highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote: > On Sun, 16 May 2010 06:05:49 -0700 (PDT),Bill Sloman > > <bill.slo...(a)ieee.org> wrote: > >The digital stroboscopic electron beam tester was canned after we'd > >built a working prototype - the problem was that we would have needed > >to sell 18 over about eighteen months to get the necessary cash flow, > >and the original marketing estimates turned out to have been about 50% > >too high. It didn't help that the original marketing specification had > >included an irrational demand that we should be able to place our > >500psec wide sampling pulse with a precision of 10psec, which meant > >that the timing electronics had to be built around Gigabit Logic's > >GaAs parts, making the development a little more demanding than it > >needed to have been (not that we ran into many unanticipated problems > >with the ultra-fast bits of the circuit). > > The GBL parts were fabulously expensive, and weren't long for this > world anyhow. Back then, 100k ECL cost roughtly ten times as much as TTL and Gigabit's GaAs cost ten times as much as the 100k ECL. More important, there were three suppliers of 100k ECL - Philips, National and Motorola, none of whom were going to go out of business, while there was just one Gigabit. I really would have much preferred to go with National's 300k ECL - the masks were made with a Cambridge Instrument EBMF 10.5 electron beam microfabricator, whose beam-steering electronics I'd personally up-graded to meet the demsnds imposed by the new, fast electron beam resist that National were using. > Tek was making sampling scopes ca 1968 that had 10 ps > resolution and jitter, using all discrete transistors. Heck, the > HP185, around 1962, managed about that good with tubes. 10KH ECL is > fine for 10 ps timing. I was digitising the trigger time delay position vis avis the 800MHz clock by digitising a period between 1.25 to 2.5 nsec to eight-bit accuracy and feeding the digtised result into the digital time delay generator, and using the low order bits of the output to generate a delay with the same resolution. the whole process - from input to output - took about 40nsec, which rather restircted the A/D converters and the D/A converters that I could use. At the time 100k ECL would have supported a 200MHz clock and 10psec resoluton in 5nsec is 9-bit accuracy, which wasn't on offer at the time. The guy running the project was primarily interested in being able to sell the machines after they had been built, and the 10psec specification would have made that part of his life easier, though in fact it slowed down the development enough that he was never in a position to actually sell a machine. > I cleaned out our library before we moved a few years ago, and tossed > a VW-sized dumpster worth of datasheets and databooks, including the > GBL databook. Pity, I should have kept that one. I still have one of > their samples, a $150 pin driver thing. I've still got my databook, but no samples. They were a bit too expensive to snaffle for souveniers. > Hittite is sort of repeating that pattern: very fast, high power > dissipation simple gates and comparators, made from exotic materials, > very expensive. I haven't bought any so far. I've used Motorola's ECLinPs parts, back when they were good for 500MHz synchronous counters. Much easier to use than GaAs, and from a much more reliable source. > Betting the farm on one product is dangerous. Our approach is to > design a lot of products every year and accept that some will sell and > some won't, and survive on the ones that sell. That means that they > all have to be turned around fast. The electron beam tester would have sold for about half a million dollars a unit, and we spent something like five million dollars on the development. You can't design a lot of that kind of product every year, and you can't turn them around fast, particularly if you push the envelope as far as we - foolishly - did. -- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen
From: JosephKK on 16 May 2010 15:26 On Fri, 14 May 2010 07:48:44 -0700, John Larkin <jjlarkin(a)highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote: >On Fri, 14 May 2010 01:45:16 -0700 (PDT), Bill Sloman ><bill.sloman(a)ieee.org> wrote: > >>On May 13, 10:05 pm, Greegor <greego...(a)gmail.com> wrote: >>> BS > Do pay attention. The trouble that Greece is >>> BS > now in will be fixed by Greece. The EU - as >>> BS > a whole - will under-write Greek borrowing >>> BS > until that happens. >>> >>> Oh GOODY! More DEBT! THAT'LL fix em! LOL! >> >>The alternative was to let them go bankrupt, taking down a bunch of >>Eurpean banks that had lent them money. This is pretty much what >>happend in 1929, and the relevant politicians know enough history to >>be aware of this, and didn't fancy going down that route again. > >There's a good argument that the government interventions in the '30s >created a decade-long depression that otherwise would have been a >year-or-so stock market bust. The "success" of the Roosevelt acts has >entered our mythology. > >It's not as though economists understand any of this stuff. > >http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/05/100511092406.htm > >> >>Right-wing nitwits are less familiar with history, and correspondingly >>more enthusiastic about repeating their ancestor's mistakes. > >History records that we had stock market bubbles and busts for >hundreds of years before 1929, and that the first great government >intervention in such a bust was followed by the first Great >Depression. > >> >>Make no mistake. The Greeks are in the process of reforming their >>economy. > >Beginning with a general strike. > > Already public servants are getting 10% lower salaries, and >>their retirement age has been raised from 61 to 65. There's a lot >>more of that kind of belt-tightening in the pipe-line. > >When "public servants" getting a 10% pay cut has serious effects on an >economy, you know that you have way too many "public servants." Indeed. It becomes a bad problem when it is the only stable jobs well. > >John >
From: JosephKK on 16 May 2010 15:32 On Fri, 14 May 2010 13:30:41 -0700, John Larkin <jjlarkin(a)highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote: >On Fri, 14 May 2010 11:08:20 -0700 (PDT), Bill Sloman ><bill.sloman(a)ieee.org> wrote: > >>On May 14, 4:48 pm, John Larkin >><jjlar...(a)highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote: >>> On Fri, 14 May 2010 01:45:16 -0700 (PDT),Bill Sloman >>> >>> <bill.slo...(a)ieee.org> wrote: >>> >On May 13, 10:05 pm, Greegor <greego...(a)gmail.com> wrote: >>> >> BS > Do pay attention. The trouble that Greece is >>> >> BS > now in will be fixed by Greece. The EU - as >>> >> BS > a whole - will under-write Greek borrowing >>> >> BS > until that happens. >>> >>> >> Oh GOODY! More DEBT! THAT'LL fix em! LOL! >>> >>> >The alternative was to let them go bankrupt, taking down a bunch of >>> >Eurpean banks that had lent them money. This is pretty much what >>> >happend in 1929, and the relevant politicians know enough history to >>> >be aware of this, and didn't fancy going down that route again. >>> >>> There's a good argument that the government interventions in the '30s >>> created a decade-long depression that otherwise would have been a >>> year-or-so stock market bust. The "success" of the Roosevelt acts has >>> entered our mythology. >> >>You've peddled this nonsense before. Unemployment in the US was around >>25% in the early 1930's, and Roosevelt's New Deal got it down to 9% in >>1937, before an unfortunate revival in economic conservatism undid the >>good work and pushed it back up to 17%. >> >>When you last posted on this subject, you ignored the fact that >>unemployment got down to 9% at the start of of 1937, which did make >>nosense of the story you were trying to sell. > >Correlation is not causality. It might have got down that low sooner >all by itself. Spending money cutting hiking trails and painting >murals is nice, but it's not the kind of productivity that hungry >people need. > >John Just the same, workfare that actually builds useful stuff and (re)trains workers to do currently employable work is not really a loss. But it needs to be called what it is, and handled as such.
From: John Larkin on 16 May 2010 15:54
On Sat, 15 May 2010 15:26:08 -0700 (PDT), Bill Sloman <bill.sloman(a)ieee.org> wrote: >On May 13, 5:59�pm, Joerg <inva...(a)invalid.invalid> wrote: >> Bill Slomanwrote: >> > On May 13, 3:46 pm, John Larkin >> > <jjlar...(a)highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote: >> >> On Thu, 13 May 2010 02:34:35 -0700 (PDT),Bill Sloman >> >> >> <bill.slo...(a)ieee.org> wrote: >> >>> On May 12, 7:57 pm, John Larkin >> >>> <jjlar...(a)highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote: >> >>>> On Wed, 12 May 2010 10:13:56 -0700 (PDT),Bill Sloman >> >>>> <bill.slo...(a)ieee.org> wrote: >> >>>>>> I don't harvest; I think. >> >>>>> An unconvincing claim. Your "thinking" reflects your indolent habit of >> >>>>> picking up predigested �nonsense that fits your fat-headed >> >>>>> preconceptions. >> >>>> I've been calling you a fathead for years. You can't even design >> >>>> original insults. >> >>>>> In this thread you've claimed that the euro can't be stable currency >> >>>>> because it shared across several countries with different economic >> >>>>> strengths and weaknessess, while failing to note that the US dollar is >> >>>>> shared across the united states of America - running from Alaska to >> >>>>> Wyoming (neither of whose economies look much like California's). >> >>>> But we only have one government. >> >>> Your states don't have legislatures and governors? >> >> They aren't allowed to print money or regulate big financial >> >> institutions. Most must balance their budgets. The trouble that >> >> California is in now will be fixed by California. The trouble that >> >> Greece is in now will be fixed by Germany. >> >> > Do pay attention. The trouble that Greece is now in will be fixed by >> > Greece. The EU - as a whole - will under-write Greek borrowing until >> > that happens. The Germans have had quite a lot of influence on the >> > requirements imposed on the Greeks in return for the guarantees, but >> > the Greeks have to do the work. >> >> Do pay attention: >> >> http://www.europeanvoice.com/article/2010/05/german-parliament-clears... >> >> Quote: "Members of the Bundestag, Germany's lower house, approved a >> state-backed guarantee for the loan ..." > >It's you who needs to pay attention. The EU - as a whole - is under- >writing the Greek borrowing. The individual memebers of the EU have to >pass legislation to approve their particular country's part of the >package. The Dutch lower house approved the Dutch component recently. >It's still a collective decision. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article7127621.ece http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aqquuYOAN_sE It's bizarre that this is happening. But you may recall that I've been ranting for years about Europe's demographic time bomb. I didn't realise that there was a shorter-fuse fiscal bomb too. John |