Who's rewired their house for this hobby?

[Jon Elson]

On 11/27/2014 01:00 AM, Mark Linimon wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 26, 2014 at 09:03:47PM -0700, Eric Smith wrote:
>> Look through a 10K or 100K databook.
> I used to have one of the former around somewhere :-)
>
> Related question: is ECL still used in anything these days?
>
> mcl
>
Not much, any more.  The old 10K and 100K ECL has not been 
produced since
the late 80's, I think.  There is still a fair amount of new 
old stock somewhere,
maybe people are salvaging chips off boards.  It is still a 
standard method
of sending trigger signals around in nuclear data 
acquisition systems, and
MC10124 and 10125 TTL-ECL translators are used a lot, but 
otherwise
ECL logic functions are RARELY used.  Now, everybody in the 
nuclear business
is moving to LVDS, gives all the advantages of fast 
differential signalling without
the huge power dissipation.

(My day job is in the area of nuclear signal processing, and 
I designed a
bunch of ECL gear about 20 years ago.  We still use that 
stuff, and I maintain
it, but haven't built anything new except occasionally using 
a 10124 or 10125
to connect to the old stuff.  For logic, we can do stuff 
with FPGAs that will
run rings around the old ECL.)

Jon