Holidays have been used in the past to paste some pictures together for my background image. This time it was a change of role as well. As I’ve once stated, I don’t really like the “sustainability” title on things. It’s much too management whereas I like focusing on engineering. So I stuck to the “renewable energy” stuff, or so I said. In the meantime I’ve realized that I really don’t write about renewable energy anymore. It turned out it WAS a passing phase for me, as Cherish from “Faraday’s Cage is where you put Schroedinger’s Cat” once said in the comments of a post.

As more circuits get pushed into SoC (Systems on a Chip), the software that designs them becomes more and more important. Well, it’s been important for a while now. Important enough to be a multi-billion dollar industry. Biiiiig money.

Harry Gries is an EDA consultant with over 20 years in the electronics industry in various roles. He now consults for different companies and also writes a blog about his experience called “Harry…The ASIC Guy”. I love hearing about the different pieces of the electronics food chain and Harry was nice enough to take some time to talk to me about his work. Let’s see what he had to say…

Even though I’ve stated that I’m not as interested in sustainability as I used to be, it doesn’t mean I don’t think about it. I have been thinking about it in conjunction with investing and my own work in the electronic industry.

Growth is a very important component to the electronics business. It’s priced into many stocks and it drives much of the electronics food chain. Moore’s law has helped for a long time too. Shrinking the geometry of silicon every 18 months really required manufacturers to update their equipment often. This then drives the equipment manufacturers to advance technology to make the new fabrication possible. The analog engineers (ok, digital too) out there utilize the new chips and make requests for the next generation. The ripple effect continues all the way down the line, requiring input from the manfacturers and returning revenue to the shareholders of said manufacturers. Like I said, this growth is an assumption and is priced into how people invest in companies involved in electronics manufacturing.

I’ve been going over my personal finances lately. I’ve decided that I would like to increase my wealth (shocker, I’m sure). I’ve always been a bit of a cheapskate and I’ve cut back more thanks to the recession. And so I need to go in the other direction. And why not? Making more is just as effective as spending less on the road to wealth.

So how do I make money?

I’ve never really thought about that before. I guess there are the conventional routes:

People who have read this site before are sure to have seen some of the witty comments from our friend Fluxor, who writes on his site, Flying Flux. What you may not have taken the time to find out is that Fluxor is a successful analog chip designer and has worked on myriad designs throughout his career. In my continuing quest to learn more about analog electronics, and specifically the difference between an analog system designer and an analog chip designer, I asked Fluxor if he’d answer a few of my questions. He was very gracious with his time and gave great insight into the world of analog chip design.

Sometimes I dive head first into problems and it gets me in trouble. Other times, this is called “prototyping”, which is encouraged in many engineering circles, and sometimes even required! The best case scenario is when you can flesh out the details and downfalls of a project before you make costly design decisions. You can realize not to use a particular op amp or even decide if a project is feasible at all.

Welp, it’s over. And I survived. We’ll see in about 10 weeks if it was worth it.

Overall, it was an interesting experience.

The test itself was very stringently administered. Imagine going to an airport. You stand in line for a long time. You get through the door. You make sure you have your ticket and your government issued ID out and ready to be checked. “Walk through the door please!”, they say.  Hold up your belongings. Are they all in a clear ziplock bag? They’d better be, otherwise they take them away. No cellphones during liftoff. No cellphones at all, you’ll get kicked off the plane in a second. Once you’re ready to disembark you need to wait for the attendants to finish checking. Everything. Thoroughly.

Ha, my title sounds like the beginning of a spam email. I’m actually even willing to have at least one FeedBlitz email that gets sent out to be caught in a spam filter, just to prove my point.

Either way, the title of this post looks ridiculous. And yet it is pervasive in headlines on the internet and in newsprint. Why? Because people are hungry for new ideas, new ways to try and make money and free energy (I guess those could all be classified under the money category). The reason these headlines are everywhere is because they work. They grab peoples’ attention, including my own.

Looking back through the past year I naturally gravitated towards the idea book and calendar I used to keep. While I did find some dormant post ideas I might resurrect for this site, I thought this short idea (gripe really) was much more entertaining; plus I’m not too sure when I would ever post this other than now. A list of words/phrases that don’t necessarily have anything to do with electronics but ones I can’t stand nevertheless. Here we go:

To all friends, family, readers and random passers-by: Thank you for coming to my site and I hope you have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

This tree was decorated with the help of a few scrapped boards from the late 80s and early 90s. The red components are relays and there are a few electrolytic capacitors scattered throughout. The LEDs were scavenged from a display board and set to pulse with a Source Meter that was sweeping current from 0 to 10 mA. High precision resistors could also be found on the tree, although it may be tough to tell they were actually high precision. The star at the top of the tree was made from 5 DIP package op amps and one can op amp. The “tinsel” and “garland” was actually solder wick and solder.