Re: ANY(ONE can code

From	john larkin <jl@glen--canyon.com>
Newsgroups	sci.electronics.design
Subject	Re: ANY(ONE can code
Date	2025-08-17 10:23 -0700
Organization	A noiseless patient Spider
Message-ID	<ej34akt24uak4mf86dhlmri5im4u246dnp@4ax.com> (permalink)
References	(8 earlier) <107qauu$1pg9g$1@dont-email.me> <1lq1akd1bc4kihg4fvpidv7okmbt08vh09@4ax.com> <107rm5p$237pm$1@dont-email.me> <uss3ak9f4k0buhlnuqki0o65eak2r1r3a1@4ax.com> <107t12t$2el0o$1@dont-email.me>

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On Mon, 18 Aug 2025 02:47:24 +1000, Bill Sloman <bill.sloman@ieee.org>
wrote:

>On 18/08/2025 1:31 am, john larkin wrote:
>> On Sun, 17 Aug 2025 14:35:04 +1000, Bill Sloman <bill.sloman@ieee.org>
>> wrote:
>> 
>>> On 17/08/2025 6:40 am, john larkin wrote:
>>>> On Sun, 17 Aug 2025 02:17:33 +1000, Bill Sloman <bill.sloman@ieee.org>
>>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> On 13/08/2025 12:37 am, john larkin wrote:
>>>>>> On Tue, 12 Aug 2025 16:19:25 +1000, Bill Sloman <bill.sloman@ieee.org>
>>>>>> wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>> On 12/08/2025 9:19 am, john larkin wrote:
>>>>>>>> On Tue, 12 Aug 2025 03:32:16 +1000, Bill Sloman <bill.sloman@ieee.org>
>>>>>>>> wrote:
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> On 12/08/2025 1:50 am, john larkin wrote:
>>>>>>>>>> On Mon, 11 Aug 2025 07:27:37 -0700, Don Y
>>>>>>>>>> <blockedofcourse@foo.invalid> wrote:
>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>> On 8/11/2025 5:12 AM, BillGill wrote:
>>>>>>>>>>>> On 8/10/2025 9:27 AM, Don Y wrote:
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> <snip>
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>> We design hardware that way. We seldom know or care about the
>>>>>>>>>> internals of components. We design from data sheets or experiments and
>>>>>>>>>> simulate using ideal components and encrypted behavioral models.
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> Since the inductors in your Spice simulations rarely have the data sheet
>>>>>>>>> parallel capacitance plugged into the Spice model of your inductor, you
>>>>>>>>> clearly don't care as much as you should about the internals of at least
>>>>>>>>> some of your components.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> I care when it matters. Inductor SRF rarely does.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> If you only design very slow stuff, that may be true.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> 20 GHz wideband e/o modulators with picosecond resolution timing
>>>>>> generators is about our limit. We're getting lazy, I guess.
>>>>>
>>>>> Scarcely a circuit which would use use much in the way of wound
>>>>> inductors - they might show up in the power supplies, but at 20GHz
>>>>> everything starts looking like a transmission line where the parallel
>>>>> capacitance is an integral part of the circuit. That was certainly true
>>>>> for the 1 GHz stuff that I did forty years ago.
>>>>
>>>> Distributed amplifier bias networks tend to use inductors. Some people
>>>> like those dreadful conical things, but there are better ways.
>>>>
>>>> Lots of people make conicals now that the Piconics patents have timed
>>>> out.
>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> I am aware that you do "design" fast stuff, though design doesn't seem
>>>>> to be quite the right word for your approach.
>>>>
>>>> I accept that we have different approaches to electronic design. My
>>>> approach is to actually build stuff that works and sells.
>>>
>>> So was mine, back when I could find people to hire me. The 1GHz stuff
>>> ended  up in a product Cambridge Instruments sold. I even got a patent
>>> out of it.
>>>
>>> "U.K. patent 2139411 "Moving Plate" (also US patent 4614872) on an
>>> improved blanking system for charged particle beams, easily adjusted to
>>> match a wide range of particle velocities; assigned to Cambridge
>>> Instruments in 1983."
>>>
>>> The boss wanted our voltage contrast electron microscope to be also
>>> capable of EBIC (electron beam-induced current), so the beam-blanking
>>> system had to cope with beam voltages from 15kV to 300V - blanking
>>> plates long enough (18mm) to bend a 15kV had more than 0.5nsec transit
>>> time for a 300V beam. If you could set the electrodes parallel to the
>>> beam for the 15KV beam, and rotate them until they were at right angle
>>> to beam for beam voltages less than about 800V you could shorten up the
>>> region of interaction enough to stay out of trouble.
>>>
>>> We did push the envelope a bit further than you seem to.
>> 
>> We did the picosecond master timing system and multi-GHz beam
>> modulators for the world's biggest laser. That was fun. The Livermore
>> people are wonderful to work with. We always seemed to work with a
>> genius female physicist who did the heavy thinking.
>
>Of course your scheme was taken from the Hewlett-Packard Journal, and 
>made a lot more sense back when it was invented.

HP's vernier-locked digital delay generators and picosecond time
interval counters were big and clumsy, not worth copying. I'm not
aware that HP did any eo modulators.

Got references? Thought not.

>
>Now that we've got really low jitter local oscillators - not as stable 
>as atomic clocks, but with quite a bit less jitter - a common clock does 
>make a lot more sense (even if it depends on a lump of sapphire immersed 
>in liquid helium and seems to have been invented in Western Australia 
>for the Australian over the horizon radar system).
>
>One of the more depressing features of the Review of Scientific 
>Instruments is way it reveals that American physicists don't take 
>electronics all that seriously. The one time I dropped your name on a 
>physicists from the NIF he was wasn't in the least impressed.
>
>> https://www.llnl.gov/article/48771/nif-welcomes-100000th-visitor
>> 
>> We're not sure which of us was actually # 100,000.
>
>And why would you care?

Free ice cream.

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Thread

ANY(ONE can code Don Y <blockedofcourse@foo.invalid> - 2025-08-10 07:27 -0700
  Re: ANY(ONE can code Bill Sloman <bill.sloman@ieee.org> - 2025-08-11 02:09 +1000
  Re: ANY(ONE can code BillGill <tonisdad215@gmail.com> - 2025-08-11 07:12 -0500
    Re: ANY(ONE can code john larkin <jl@glen--canyon.com> - 2025-08-11 07:22 -0700
    Re: ANY(ONE can code Don Y <blockedofcourse@foo.invalid> - 2025-08-11 07:27 -0700
      Re: ANYONE can code Don Y <blockedofcourse@foo.invalid> - 2025-08-11 07:46 -0700
      Re: ANY(ONE can code john larkin <jl@glen--canyon.com> - 2025-08-11 08:50 -0700
        Re: ANY(ONE can code Bill Sloman <bill.sloman@ieee.org> - 2025-08-12 03:32 +1000
          Re: ANY(ONE can code john larkin <jl@glen--canyon.com> - 2025-08-11 16:19 -0700
            Re: ANY(ONE can code Bill Sloman <bill.sloman@ieee.org> - 2025-08-12 16:19 +1000
              Re: ANY(ONE can code john larkin <jl@glen--canyon.com> - 2025-08-12 07:37 -0700
                Re: ANY(ONE can code Bill Sloman <bill.sloman@ieee.org> - 2025-08-13 15:28 +1000
                Re: ANY(ONE can code Bill Sloman <bill.sloman@ieee.org> - 2025-08-17 02:17 +1000
                Re: ANY(ONE can code john larkin <jl@glen--canyon.com> - 2025-08-16 13:40 -0700
                Re: ANY(ONE can code Bill Sloman <bill.sloman@ieee.org> - 2025-08-17 14:35 +1000
                Re: ANY(ONE can code john larkin <jl@glen--canyon.com> - 2025-08-17 08:31 -0700
                Re: ANY(ONE can code Bill Sloman <bill.sloman@ieee.org> - 2025-08-18 02:47 +1000
                Re: ANY(ONE can code john larkin <jl@glen--canyon.com> - 2025-08-17 10:23 -0700
                Re: ANY(ONE can code Bill Sloman <bill.sloman@ieee.org> - 2025-08-18 21:08 +1000
                Re: ANY(ONE can code john larkin <jl@glen--canyon.com> - 2025-08-18 07:10 -0700
                Re: ANY(ONE can code Joe Gwinn <joegwinn@comcast.net> - 2025-08-18 10:57 -0400
                Re: ANY(ONE can code john larkin <jl@glen--canyon.com> - 2025-08-18 08:44 -0700
                Re: ANY(ONE can code Gerhard Hoffmann <dk4xp@arcor.de> - 2025-08-22 09:54 +0200
                Re: ANY(ONE can code john larkin <jl@glen--canyon.com> - 2025-08-22 07:39 -0700
                Re: ANY(ONE can code Gerhard Hoffmann <dk4xp@arcor.de> - 2025-08-22 17:21 +0200
                Re: ANY(ONE can code john larkin <jl@glen--canyon.com> - 2025-08-22 08:47 -0700
                Re: ANY(ONE can code Bill Sloman <bill.sloman@ieee.org> - 2025-08-19 17:12 +1000
                Re: ANY(ONE can code john larkin <jl@glen--canyon.com> - 2025-08-19 04:09 -0700
                Re: ANY(ONE can code Bill Sloman <bill.sloman@ieee.org> - 2025-08-20 00:53 +1000
                Re: ANY(ONE can code Gerhard Hoffmann <dk4xp@arcor.de> - 2025-08-22 10:45 +0200
                Re: ANY(ONE can code Don Y <blockedofcourse@foo.invalid> - 2025-08-22 02:14 -0700
                Re: ANY(ONE can code Phil Hobbs <pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> - 2025-08-22 11:41 +0000
                Re: ANY(ONE can code Buzz McCool <buzz_mccool@yahoo.com> - 2025-08-22 09:44 -0700
                Re: ANY(ONE can code Gerhard Hoffmann <dk4xp@arcor.de> - 2025-08-22 09:37 +0200
    Re: ANY(ONE can code Don Y <blockedofcourse@foo.invalid> - 2025-08-11 12:19 -0700
      Re: ANY(ONE can code john larkin <jl@glen--canyon.com> - 2025-08-18 08:47 -0700
        Re: ANY(ONE can code Bill Sloman <bill.sloman@ieee.org> - 2025-08-19 17:19 +1000
          Re: ANY(ONE can code bitrex <user@example.net> - 2025-08-22 20:52 -0400
        Re: ANY(ONE can code Gerhard Hoffmann <dk4xp@arcor.de> - 2025-08-22 10:57 +0200
          Re: ANY(ONE can code Don Y <blockedofcourse@foo.invalid> - 2025-08-22 02:18 -0700
            Re: ANY(ONE can code Gerhard Hoffmann <dk4xp@arcor.de> - 2025-08-22 11:39 +0200
              Re: ANY(ONE can code Don Y <blockedofcourse@foo.invalid> - 2025-08-22 03:09 -0700
                Re: ANY(ONE can code Don Y <blockedofcourse@foo.invalid> - 2025-08-22 11:51 -0700
            Re: ANY(ONE can code john larkin <jl@glen--canyon.com> - 2025-08-22 07:54 -0700
              Re: ANY(ONE can code Bill Sloman <bill.sloman@ieee.org> - 2025-08-23 02:11 +1000

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