Al's Story
My friend and neighbor Al has been in the electronics business a bit longer than I have. I spent a week traveling all over Western Nevada with Al two weeks ago, so we spent a lot of time in the car together. Al told me that one of his first jobs was to develop a transistor tester to characterize the hand-made junction transistors his company was getting from RCA, Philco, and other vendors. Transistor-to-transistor device characteristics varied wildly back then because transistor manufacture was pure alchemy in the 1950s.
Another job Al had in that era was to linearize some signals. Al told me it was pretty tough to do this back then. All he had to work with was resistors, capacitors, diodes, and discrete transistors.
Last week, I read about a new microcontroller from Zilog called the Z8 Encore XP, which would have made this job much easier. The Z8 Enxore XP is based on the 8-bit Z8 processor core, which I recall using to design the electronics for a total-organic-content water analyzer back in the early 1980s.
Today's Z8 processor comes packaged in an 8-lead SOIC and costs around a dollar. In addition to the processor core, the Z8 Encore XP includes four 10-bit A/D converters and 4K bytes of flash memory on chip. You program it in C. If I could go back 50 years to tell my friend Al that I could do a piecewise linearization of four of his signals to about 0.1% for a buck (that would be linearization for 25 cents per signal), and that I could get a prototype running in a day, I wonder what he'd say.
The point in telling you Al's story is to remind you that no technology stands still. Consequently, your approach to system design can't stand still either. We all chuckle a bit about Al's predicaments 50 years ago because we have far more advanced ways of dealing with the problems he had to solve using much cruder tools.
However, is Al's situation still funny when you're using the same SOC design techniques that you used 10 years ago?
Another job Al had in that era was to linearize some signals. Al told me it was pretty tough to do this back then. All he had to work with was resistors, capacitors, diodes, and discrete transistors.
Last week, I read about a new microcontroller from Zilog called the Z8 Encore XP, which would have made this job much easier. The Z8 Enxore XP is based on the 8-bit Z8 processor core, which I recall using to design the electronics for a total-organic-content water analyzer back in the early 1980s.
Today's Z8 processor comes packaged in an 8-lead SOIC and costs around a dollar. In addition to the processor core, the Z8 Encore XP includes four 10-bit A/D converters and 4K bytes of flash memory on chip. You program it in C. If I could go back 50 years to tell my friend Al that I could do a piecewise linearization of four of his signals to about 0.1% for a buck (that would be linearization for 25 cents per signal), and that I could get a prototype running in a day, I wonder what he'd say.
The point in telling you Al's story is to remind you that no technology stands still. Consequently, your approach to system design can't stand still either. We all chuckle a bit about Al's predicaments 50 years ago because we have far more advanced ways of dealing with the problems he had to solve using much cruder tools.
However, is Al's situation still funny when you're using the same SOC design techniques that you used 10 years ago?
posted by Steve Leibson at
2:50 PM
1 Comments:
Cool story. My, how times change.
I've been fiddling with the Z8 series for a couple of years. I'm a chemist with a strong electronics background and I needed to run some electrochem stuff. An engineer at our company had a salesman give him a development kit, and when I told him what I wanted to do, he handed it to me. I found out it would do what I wanted, and when I looked, I found I could get the dev kits for about 40 bucks. I use the development boards in my DIY instruments. The C compiler is pretty good, the tech support is good, and as you pointed out, the chip is not bad at all. My favorite config is to build a LabVIEW front end, then talk to the board through the serial port. I have plenty of high powered (and high dollar!) instrumentation around, but for weird little jobs, where I want something to sit for a while, the Z8 works great.
They have a more sophisticated chip, the Acclaim, that has ethernet support. I have barely hooked this up, but for web-based instrumentation, it looks like a winner.
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Robin St. John, at 7:43 PM
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