scott wrote:

> Oh yeh that's a good one.  We have a lot of contact (no pun intended) 
> with touch panel companies, they are all offering their custom ICs to 
> process the touch panel signals into easily usable form.  They will even 
> license their designs to us to include with our ICs to reduce costs.

Maybe it's just the part of the world I live in, but I thought touch 
screen technology was still very rare?

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>> ...which isn't useful unless you happen to design chips for a living,
>> with approximately 0.0% of the population does.
> 
> Tisk, Tisk. Using 1 decimal place means that 25 thousand people in 
> England could design chips for a living and not show up in your figures. 
> :-P

Yes.

It also means that until the number gets about 10x larger, there is no 
possibility of getting such a job, because all the places will be filled.

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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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> Maybe it's just the part of the world I live in, but I thought touch 
> screen technology was still very rare?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_mobile_phones
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-10389847-17.html

Put together the sales of all iPhones, iPods and clones and that's a huge 
number of touch screens.

The Nintendo DS has a touch screen, and has sold 130m units according to 
wikipedia.

Sales of portable navigation systems like TomTom have exploded in the last 
few years, they all have touch screens.

Most LCDs put into cars for navigation also have touch screens.

LCDs sold to the industrial segment usually have touch screens (eg for use 
to control machinery or to put into ATMs or POS machines etc).

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>> Maybe it's just the part of the world I live in, but I thought touch 
>> screen technology was still very rare?
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_mobile_phones
> http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-10389847-17.html
> 
> Put together the sales of all iPhones, iPods and clones and that's a 
> huge number of touch screens.

I wasn't aware that the iPhone has a touch-screen. (I hadn't really 
thought about it...) I've never seen an iPod, so I wouldn't know 
anything about that. And since I never see any mobile phones [other than 
the one I own], I wasn't aware that any of them have touch-screens yet. 
(My initial reaction is that that would get dirty quite fast and/or stop 
working extremely quickly... Presumably the product developers have 
thought of that.)

> The Nintendo DS has a touch screen, and has sold 130m units according to 
> wikipedia.

Hmm, I didn't know that. But, again, I've never really seen a DS up 
close, so...

> Sales of portable navigation systems like TomTom have exploded in the 
> last few years, they all have touch screens.

I know that _my_ TomTom has a touch screen. I wasn't aware that that 
sort of thing is popular though.

> Most LCDs put into cars for navigation also have touch screens.

They put LCDs into cars now? :-P

> LCDs sold to the industrial segment usually have touch screens (eg for 
> use to control machinery or to put into ATMs or POS machines etc).

Most ATMs I've seen still have those ancient green phosphor screens. 
(Well, no, some of them are LCD - especially the ones in shopping 
centers and stuff.) It would probably be easier to operate them if they 
were touch-screen; sometimes you can't tell what damned button lines up 
with which command!

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On 11/06/2010 3:22 PM, Invisible wrote:
>>> ...which isn't useful unless you happen to design chips for a living,
>>> with approximately 0.0% of the population does.
>>
>> Tisk, Tisk. Using 1 decimal place means that 25 thousand people in
>> England could design chips for a living and not show up in your
>> figures. :-P
>
> Yes.
>
> It also means that until the number gets about 10x larger, there is no
> possibility of getting such a job, because all the places will be filled.

You're not asking for much for no effort, are you?

Do you remember a year or so back, you agreed to be less negative in 
your outlook. It really is destructive.

-- 

Best Regards,
	Stephen

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On 11/06/2010 3:17 PM, scott wrote:
>>> ...which isn't useful unless you happen to design chips for a living,
>>> with approximately 0.0% of the population does.
>>
>> Tisk, Tisk. Using 1 decimal place means that 25 thousand people in
>> England could design chips for a living and not show up in your
>> figures. :-P
>
> Also I don't think anyone doing anything as specific as "digital IC
> design" takes up more than 0.05% of the population, it's simply too
> narrow a classification. Most of the people I know that do this also do
> other electrical stuff, hence their job title is "electrical engineer"
> and not "IC designer".
>
>

It is a niche market.

-- 

Best Regards,
	Stephen

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>> 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.

Presumably none are fast or flexible enough within reasonable cost.  Same 
reason why Canon has its Digic IC and doesn't just an off-the-shelf IC.

> Really? There aren't higher-speed CPU or DSP chips you can use?

Probably an overkill (in terms of size, power and cost) if you only want it 
to do a specific task very well.  You don't want a dual core x86 CPU (with 
associated heatsink and fans) inside your HD camcorder just to compress 
MPEG4 video in real time, or inside your TV to calculate in between frames 
:-)

> I wouldn't notice power consumption, brightness and thickness I haven't 
> seen any noticable difference,

Brightness and power consumption are linked, usually brightness is kept 
roughly constant now and power consumption is reduced.  You must have seen 
the new LCD TVs that are only 10 or 15 mm thick?  5 years ago that would 
have been impossible.

> 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.

Err why would you be surprised?  It's a necessary activity to be able to 
test your own products!

> Out of curiosity, what's the job?

The electrical version of what I do.  You would like the FPGA/VHDL stuff, 
but it would also involve analogue stuff (EMC issues mainly), talking to 
customers and travelling abroad, so you definitely wouldn't like it :-) 
There would probably also be opportunity to do some research on electronics 
on glass for various display-related stuff, I've seen quite a few patent 
applications about digital circuits come out from that group (eg how to do 
effects based on the previous frame without needing the RAM to store a whole 
frame, novel layouts for bidirectional shift registers, allowing certain 
parts of the circuits to be powered down during certain times, that kind of 
thing).

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Stephen wrote:

> Do you remember a year or so back, you agreed to be less negative in 
> your outlook. It really is destructive.

I've spent months looking for a job as a system administrator. Almost 
all companies who own more than 6 computers require such a person, and 
yet I can find almost nothing to apply for. So excuse me if I seem a 
little pessimistic about the probabilities of landing a job in a highly 
specialised field that only a tiny number of companies operate in...

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>> Really? There aren't higher-speed CPU or DSP chips you can use?
> 
> Probably an overkill (in terms of size, power and cost) if you only want 
> it to do a specific task very well.  You don't want a dual core x86 CPU 
> (with associated heatsink and fans) inside your HD camcorder just to 
> compress MPEG4 video in real time, or inside your TV to calculate in 
> between frames :-)

x86 is inefficient anyway. ;-) The only reason to use it is backwards 
compatbility - which isn't a consideration when designing a new product.

I'd be surprised if there aren't already off-the-shelf parts you can buy 
for MPEG4 decoding. Surely there are for MPEG1...

>> I wouldn't notice power consumption, brightness and thickness I 
>> haven't seen any noticable difference,
> 
> Brightness and power consumption are linked, usually brightness is kept 
> roughly constant now and power consumption is reduced.  You must have 
> seen the new LCD TVs that are only 10 or 15 mm thick?  5 years ago that 
> would have been impossible.

Presumably that's why until a few years ago nobody sold LCD TVs in the 
first place then?

>> 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.
> 
> Err why would you be surprised?  It's a necessary activity to be able to 
> test your own products!

Sure. But how often do you need to design new test equipment?

>> Out of curiosity, what's the job?
> 
> The electrical version of what I do.  You would like the FPGA/VHDL 
> stuff, but it would also involve analogue stuff (EMC issues mainly), 
> talking to customers and travelling abroad, so you definitely wouldn't 
> like it :-)

Ah, OK. So even if I had the qualifications I wouldn't be applying for 
this. ;-)

Sometimes it seems like there isn't a job in existence where you can 
avoid having customers shout at you...

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