It's day two here at the ESC show. Yesterday was so busy, I didn't have time to write, walk around or do much more than talk and breathe. Today has been pretty busy too, but I did get around a... Read more
I've written about the Castellated / half-via mounting system a couple of times in the past. Now I can't seem to avoid them. I'm seeing them everywhere. The GPS I recently wrote about, low noise amplifiers, POL power modules, frequency... Read more
The Embedded Systems Conference, Silicon Valley, is less than a week away and Screaming Circuits will be there in booth 827. I've been getting prepped all week (well, actually a lot longer than just all week) and that drives me... Read more
A nice coincidence. Recently, I wrote a bit about choosing a microcontroller and some issues that crop up when people not used to microcontroller design are tasked with automating systems. My supposition is that, traditionally, most folks in the industry... Read more
It never stops. Does it? It never stops, but it does seem to accelerate. When I fuddled with my first 7400 series logic chip a bazzilion years ago, it was a 0.1" pitch DIP chip. A few years after that,... Read more
I've been thinking a lot lately about who's using microcontrollers and why these days. There's a lot at stake with this question. And, not just in terms of which microcontrollers are and will be the most popular. There's an element... Read more
Modules with castellated mounting holes are showing up more and more these days. I've also heard it called a "half-via" setup. Both seem to fit. The copper mounting pads on the bottom of the module's little PCB wrap up the... Read more
I was looking at two different PCBs recently; one assembled here at Screaming Circuits, and one, a PC graphics card assembled someplace else in the world. In both cases, a crooked component caught my eye. The graphics card, at least,... Read more
Screaming Circuits is seeing more and more components in short supply or on allocation these days. A while back, we took a survey of our customers and found that on average, an engineer would spend about 16 hours sourcing parts... Read more
A thought occurred to me over the weekend as I was pursuing through some of my recent posts and comments. Back in the late 80's and early 90's, Total Quality Management with such phrases as "Cross-functional team" was all the... Read more
