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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