31 Dec
2005
31 Dec
'05
8:56 p.m.
I find it a great pity that now that transistors have
become so cheap
(particularly when in ICs), most people don't care how many are used,
and most modern designs use far too many of them.
"Too many" in what sense? :)
It's amazing what could be done with 2 or 3 of the
things, but those
clever designs have been mostly forgotten.
Yes...at least in part because they tend to need a pile of other
things, like capacitors and inductors, which are difficult to stick
onto ICs. I'm not convinced there's anything wrong with using several
dozen transistors on a chip die instead of a couple of transistors and
a half-dozen miscellanous discrete passives.
Well, except that it leaves less opportunity to express hack value.
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