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most recently: https://dyson-sphere-program.fandom.com/wiki/Microcrystallin...
I spent most of the day yesterday chasing down crosses for P-Channel FETs. They are all GONE. No stock of anything (except the crappy ones, super-tiny packages, high Vgs(th) or high Rds(on) and other leftovers). I've never seen anything like this, it's kind of frightening. Like walking into a grocery store and seeing the aisles all EMPTY except for a few scraps. I don't even know where they all went. It's not like yo…
Fun fact: Solar cells and the LEDs are the same element. If you wire up a solar cell like an LED, it glows dimly in infrared. QA uses this to diagnose dysfunctional wafers.
I spent most of the day yesterday chasing down crosses for P-Channel FETs. They are all GONE. No stock of anything (except the crappy ones, super-tiny packages, high Vgs(th) or high Rds(on) and other leftovers). I've never seen anything like this, it's kind of frightening. Like walking into a grocery store and seeing the aisles all EMPTY except for a few scraps. I don't even know where they all went. It's not like yo…
Same with USB-UART bridges; zip, nada, nothing. I found some Cypress parts a few weeks ago, and I should consider myself lucky.
I won't order PCB until I have all reels of parts on my desk.
Good overview, but he's missing one of the coolest applications of semiconductor / photolithography. MEMS. Micro-electromagnetic systems. The most common MEMS I can think of is the comb sensor, used for accelerometers in all of your cell phones. https://www.memsjournal.com/2010/12/motion-sensing-in-the-ip... The MEMS sensor for an accelerometer is quite simple. Take the nearest comb and smack it against a desk: you'l…
I spent most of the day yesterday chasing down crosses for P-Channel FETs. They are all GONE. No stock of anything (except the crappy ones, super-tiny packages, high Vgs(th) or high Rds(on) and other leftovers). I've never seen anything like this, it's kind of frightening. Like walking into a grocery store and seeing the aisles all EMPTY except for a few scraps. I don't even know where they all went. It's not like yo…
It's not TSMC capacity that's the problem. It's the large nodes that make everything except cutting-edge processors. Nobody builds a new large-node fab, but demand for large node components keeps rising.
Fun fact: Solar cells and the LEDs are the same element. If you wire up a solar cell like an LED, it glows dimly in infrared. QA uses this to diagnose dysfunctional wafers.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=BM7VDOoFIWI
The LED is the component on the left; there's a very dim flash (pretty much just the black die turning red) at around 11s, then every few seconds.
I can't remember exactly how it works... I think there's two capacitors charged up to the voltage of the LED in parallel through high-value resistors, and a circuit that shorts the +ve of one to the +ve of the other to put them in parallel.
It only just works at a very specific light level. IIRC some of the transistors are used as very low leakage diodes rather than transistors, as the regular diodes I had we're too leaky.
Fun fact: Solar cells and the LEDs are the same element. If you wire up a solar cell like an LED, it glows dimly in infrared. QA uses this to diagnose dysfunctional wafers.
Fun fact: Solar cells and the LEDs are the same element. If you wire up a solar cell like an LED, it glows dimly in infrared. QA uses this to diagnose dysfunctional wafers.
Many electronics work that way. Motors can also generate electricity. Inductors can create or sense magnetic fields. Resistance is generally temperature dependent. Etc.
Fun fact: Solar cells and the LEDs are the same element. If you wire up a solar cell like an LED, it glows dimly in infrared. QA uses this to diagnose dysfunctional wafers.
Does the same go for Peltier plates and thermocouples?
