5 Jun
2006
5 Jun
'06
3:04 a.m.
William Donzelli wrote:
Blech. It's awfully had to do anything *interesting* in Pascal...
If you want to force folks to carry around lots of excess baggage,
why not pick Ada? :-(
In a sense,
hobbyists have been spoiled by the simplicity of connecting up
TTL (and before that, RTL and DTL). Had the industry standardized on ECL,
things would be quite a bit more interesting on the design end.
Yes, like programmiung in Pascal, engineers would need to follow all the
rules. Some might say that would be a good thing... Anyway, some years ago I did some 100K design, and
pretty much if you
follow all of the rules in the Fairchild book, nearly all of the weirdo
analog (radio?) problems drop from sight. It actually was not too hard to
get away with doing a good digital design while not knowing much analog
theory. You just had to pull out the ruler quite a few times - now how
long is that trace?
I worked on a 100MHz (doesn't sound like much, 30 years later :> )
CPU in the mid 70's. The problems I found were all the *different*
ECL families (10K, 100K, MECL III, etc.) plus all the other
cruft to interface the real world to them (4000 series CMOS
for the JTAG stuff, other level translators for the "fast"
stuff). And, the colossal *power* requirements (>500W for
that CPU alone!).
Of course, with more integration, that wouldn't be as big an issue
(since a good deal of power is expended in the pin drivers).
But, the idea of having to debug with nothing metallic on
one's person (for fear of serious injury) was not something
I looked forward to...
100G scared me, so I never did anything with that
except get some parts
and datasheets.