[josephkk]

Could have done it with the 2N7000. I used the BSS123 on an ultrasound
machine design in 1986 because we were early SMT-adopters, no strictly
technical reason. But for the pulsers we used other transistors because
we needed up to 170V.

There were also a bunch of nice video-BJTs that could do it, blazingly
fast and cheap. those are gone now because of the demise of the CRT
technology for monitors and television sets.

Alas, unless i wanted to dip into my own pocket or do a lot of paperwork i
had a rather limited selection of transistors and ICs to build with.

?-)

 

[Joerg]

Alas, unless i wanted to dip into my own pocket or do a lot of paperwork i
had a rather limited selection of transistors and ICs to build with.

Paperwork to get engineering parts? I guess I wouldn't have stuck it out
at that company for very long

Did they at least allow you to order free samples?

 

[[email protected]]

Paperwork to get engineering parts? I guess I wouldn't have stuck it out
at that company for very long

At the PPoE, they made us submit reqs for SMT resistors. They thought they
could keep the inventory, or something. Of course it ended up being just
something else to keep the admin busy and engineering from doing it's job.
Hey, they're $.002 each!

Did they at least allow you to order free samples?

I'm almost embarrassed at the samples I get now. There are sometimes enough
that I would have had enough for the entire production run at the PPoE. ;-)

 

[josephkk]

Paperwork to get engineering parts? I guess I wouldn't have stuck it out
at that company for very long

Did they at least allow you to order free samples?

Never had occasion to try. Guess the selection wasn't all that limited.
The few times i needed something exotic, like CA3308 flash ADCs shortly
after they came out, i could get them.

?-)

 

[Joerg]

Never had occasion to try. Guess the selection wasn't all that limited.
The few times i needed something exotic, like CA3308 flash ADCs shortly
after they came out, i could get them.

It depends on what you develop. In my case of largely discrete analog I
have never found a lab that had all the parts I needed. Sometimes they
had almost all but that one kind of PIN diode needed to be ordered and
that has to happen without red tape.

 

[[email protected]]

We take anything we want out of the stockroom. If it's not in stock,
purchasing will get us anything we want overnight... parts or
equipment. People are far more expensive than things, and products
that are designed can be sold.

Of course you do. It's *your* stockroom. ;-) That's the way I see it, too,
but the boss wanted to track his precious 0603 resistors.

My record is 3,200 samples of the MAX9691. But we deserved them.

I thought you had to make the interposer board to substitute something else?

 

[Nico Coesel]

Of course you do. It's *your* stockroom. ;-) That's the way I see it, too,
but the boss wanted to track his precious 0603 resistors.

There is a tradeoff here. At a company I used to work for they didn't
have a decent part storage system. Putting a prototype together was a
lot of work because every part needed to be ordered. When the parts
came in they had to be stored in a box which held all the parts of a
project. This resulted in a huge stack of boxes with components that
belonged to projects long-gone.

 

[[email protected]]

We had to make the adapter board so we could use 9691's in place of
the 9690s. Somebody at Maxim asked me how many chips I needed, and I
said 3200, and he sent them. I should have said 8000.

I thought it might have been the instance where you had students apply for
samples.

 

[[email protected]]

There is a tradeoff here. At a company I used to work for they didn't
have a decent part storage system. Putting a prototype together was a
lot of work because every part needed to be ordered. When the parts
came in they had to be stored in a box which held all the parts of a
project. This resulted in a huge stack of boxes with components that
belonged to projects long-gone.

Sure, then the boss pays the inventory costs twice. That's sorta where I am
now, though. My current job is advanced platform development. We can tap
manufacturing but pretty much in full reel quantities only (the Mexicans won't
count 0402 resistors for us ;-). For most parts this isn't an issue; they're
cheap. We'll probably keep the partial reels for future projects (just have
to remember which 10K resistors we used ;-). For the stranger parts we either
get samples or get DigiReels (they insist on reels). Since it is advanced
platform development, most vendors are happy to send as many parts as we need.

 

[[email protected]]

At my PPoE, they didn't make you submit reqs (thankfully)... although of
course for most new design efforts other than passive components
typically you needed ICs that weren't in stock anyway. To do that...
you would go to DigiKey.Com, find the parts you wanted, and then e-mail
that to the purchasing lady. She'd then go to DigiKey.Com, re-key those
same part numbers, and submit the order. It always drove me nuts that
as an engineer you were literally one button click away from getting
everything ordered yourself... but instead you had to kill another 5
minutes of your own time and 30 minutes of the purchasing lady's to
perform this nonsense.

At (you know where), I'd have to send a note to our engineering admin, she'd
fill out a paper req, chase down the engineering manager and the owner (or the
CFO if he was out of town), *then* hand two copies (of five) to the purchasing
lady, who keyed it in...

What was even worse was when parts came in, though: You weren't allowed
to have them until they were entered into the big MRP system, which
might take a couple of days (if many of them were new). It didn't
matter if you told them that you were ordering a bunch of parts strictly
for evaluation and could give them an iron-clad guarantee that 90+% of
them would *never* be used on the project you were billing to (and this
was the usual case); they all had to be entered anyway! Grrr...

That end wasn't that bad. The purchase order had to be entered as "filled"
but since it wasn't a production PO, the order didn't have to enter any
production databases. It usually made it to our desk the same morning.

 

[Joerg]

Do you have the Skyworks diode sample kit?

No, but maybe I should some day. I have a lot of HP/Avago diodes.

 

[[email protected]]

No, that was a different situation. Maxim wouldn't deliver our parts,
but had lots of samples available. So I asked a bunch of people to ask
for samples. I paid the students list price.

The long-term fix is to not buy from Maxim.

Unless they know you're going to buy tens of million$ annually, certainly. The
opposite end of that spectrum is, of course, is LTC.

 

[[email protected]]

LTC is great. The parts work really well, they are available, and we
get visits, samples, support, and pricing deals.

Even with any "pricing deals", their stuff is *hugely* expensive. Great for
small companies because they support them well (as I said, the polar opposite
of Max). Not so great if you're buying a million parts.