20 Aug
2004
20 Aug
'04
11:15 a.m.
In message <m1ByIny-000JDEC@p850ug1>, Tony Duell writes:
I was once told 'The designer who never blew a chip
is a bad designer. He
never designed anything'. It's a view I totally agree with. You _will_
make mistages. The thing is to be careful with irreplacable (to you)
stuff, not to never do anything.
I certainly agree with that, though I wouldn't insist that
everyone blow a chip as spectacularly as I did in college.
I was working on a music synthesizer for one of my senior
projects and had an op-amp that was to feed my final amplifier
stage. For the time being, I was using an old tube radio
that had been hacked as my final amplifier. There was some
noticable 60Hz buzz, so I did the old trick of rotating
the power plug. Well, I learned the hard way that it's
power supply wasn't isolated when I heard a pop just moments
before smelling the tell-tale smell of charred silicon.
Of course, the plug was out of the socked before I turned
to see a 14 pin DIP with a crater in the middle of it.
The top of the package was about 6 inches away. I still
have it as a trophy now [mumble] years later.
Of course the day in my first job out of school when I hooked
up the lightning simulator backwards killed more chips. Just
none as spectacularly....
Brian L. Stuart
P.S. If you've all heard that story before, I apologize.
I'm starting to forget which ones I've already told.