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scott wrote:
>> Phones I can believe. (They have to be as tiny as possible, after all.
>> And battery performance is critical.) But other stuff? I'd be a little
>> surprised if, say, my LCD TV at home has any nonstandard components in
>> it. (Other than the LCD panel itself of course.)
>
> What, you think Sony just happened to find the "Convert 60 Hz 1080p
> signal into 240 Hz" IC in the RS catalogue whilst their competitors
> couldn't?
I presumed they were using an off-the-shelf DSP chip with a custom image
processing program.
>> From what I understand, any device that has more than about three
>> buttons on it probably contains a microprocessor. (That includes my
>> washing machine, and my toaster.) But it'll be a Z80, straight off the
>> shelf. Bolt it in there with a standard low-voltage power supply and
>> write some firmware. No call for any custom ICs there.
>
> That works fine for simple things, like the controller on your microwave
> or a keyboard, but anything that needs to deal with higher bandwidth or
> do more complex tasks in a special way would benefit from a custom IC.
Really? There aren't higher-speed CPU or DSP chips you can use?
>> (Aren't ASICs prohibitively expensive to make anyway?)
>
> Not if you're planning to use it high volume products.
Mmm, I suppose it's all design and setup cost...
>> I'm no expect, but I would have thought an LCD driver is more an
>> exercise in analogue rather than digital electronics.
>
> It's mostly digital, but then any high speed digital design becomes an
> exercise in analogue electronics when you have to start taking into
> account the capacitance and resistance of the tracks :-)
AKA "why don't we have 4 GHz RAM yet?"
>> It actually surprises me that somebody can make money just designing
>> new LCDs. To the untrained eye, they all appear to be identical,
>> except for size and resolution. Not sure why you'd ever need to design
>> a new one...
>
> In addition to size and resolution, in case you didn't notice the
> colour, viewing angle, brightness, power consumption and thickness has
> also been improving, and still is. Hence new ones still need to be
> designed.
I wouldn't notice power consumption, brightness and thickness I haven't
seen any noticable difference, but colour and viewing angle I'll grant
you...
>>> What about specialist electronic test equipment?
>>
>> This exists?
>
> Just because some things are not sold doesn't mean they don't exist. We
> have a lab full of stuff designed by us for only us to use. The guy who
> I work with used to work in a department of Siemens specially dedicated
> to designing test equipment for internal use. I would imagine most
> electronics design companies have departments like this.
I'd be surprised if a company would pay somebody full-time just to make
stuff that they only use to make sure their real products work. Still, I
guess stranger things have happened...
>> I was under the impression that a router is simply a board with an
>> off-the-shelf microprocessor, off-the-shelf RAM and a bunch of
>> off-the-shelf NIC driver chips.
>
> So what happens when a new network standard comes along (eg 802.11n),
> someone needs to design an IC for that, and it's not just one company
> that designs an IC and everyone else buys it, there are loads of
> chipsets designed with slightly different characteristics.
I suppose. But there can't be all that many companies who produce NIC
drivers. And I wouldn't have thought there's enough work there to pay
somebody full-time. (A new network standard comes out, what, every 7
years or so?)
> And still the person who designs the *board* needs to be someone who has
> a deep understanding of all the ICs, even if they didn't design them
> themselves. Board design isn't just a case of joining up the wires as
> it says on the datasheet.
Oh. Maybe that's why my boards never work! ;-)
>>> What about the thousands of companies that offer FPGA and ASIC design
>>> services - who are they doing work for? Who is working for them?
>>
>> It's news to me that anybody is in this line of work. I have no idea
>> who their clients would be.
>
> Google "FPGA design service", I get 1.2 million results.
Doesn't mean anybody's doing it for money. Wanna take a guess how many
Google hits there are for "stamp collecting"? ;-)
>> Mmm, that's not bad...
>
> Until you get some form of qualification though, you're going to fail at
> the first hurdle for most jobs.
Yeah, figures.
Out of curiosity, what's the job?
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