My baby, in real copper and components...!

Today morning, I felt extremely happy holding my new baby in real copper and components.  Yes the boards I designed have arrived from the fab-assembly unit.

Before we woke her up to this real world and feed power, she was given a full check up… As any parent would propagate how bringing up children is a difficult yet enjoyable experience, my friends added similar such experiences of theirs to normal conversations.

She is just born; need to bring her up…miles of difficult path to go. But for now, she is the cutest baby I have ever seen because she is of my blood :)

JOY!...

A good lab infrastructure, a small enthusiastic bonded team, newly designed electronic cards for testing...this is called JOY...
What do you say?

My new baby

I am in race for my new baby....I mean a new board that I have started designing. It is a real thrilling experience. It is a digital video board, lot of challenges :)
20 weeks from now she will be ready to be born...
After all Boards and babies are the same...you design them and you care for them.

Processor implantation

Today we went to our contract assembly House and got our cute-girl's brain implanted by a healthy one. Electrically she is fine...waiting for her to wake up...

In an effort to save my beloved

Today was the hectic day.
Tring tring: A phone call conveying that the electronic board is hung.
In-situ explanation by the team member: “I heard a spark and I turned off the system”
Immediate conclusion: Power – Ground short
I suspected capacitor damage surge current / ESD
I wanted to restore the small cute baby to life: I de-soldered the capacitors.
Hope this would bring her back to life.
Nope :o(
Still EEPROM was in system: It was healthy
My cute girl’s processor is gone.
Indeed very sad to admit that she was not given the basic ESD care.
Hope this is the first and last of such errors.

First Circuit designed in my career

The first circuit I designed in my career is something that I would never forget in life…The solitary moments in the company when I designed it, early morning around 6.00am…The beauty of the datasheet…the versatility of the design guide…the CAD notes…the intriguing decoupling caps and so on…and also the exclamations received from my peers on seeing the design. Though this happened some 5 months before, today was the day of the design closure and launch to the next stage of the product cycle, so I would be busy placing my designed circuit on the board :)

Operation U43

It was a crucial moment for all of us. A pre - testing was blocking everybody’s time. The operation required to remove an organ (IC - U43) completely from the PCB board. Knowing that I had to remove an IC that is very small with lot of veins (traces) running adjacently and lot of vital organs lying nearby, I relied upon the skill of our lab technician Manjunath BV. With lot of effort we first isolated the vein junctions (the PCB pads) from the IC pins, this was the most difficult as the veins were so close to each other by 0.5mm. After about 40 minutes of hard work, finally we isolated the entire organ about (7mm by 7mm) from the body…the IC from the board.
The operation is a success…The PCB will be given a small test injection (probe) tomorrow before the full test is carried on it.

Case of Gender Changer

Today, I had to shuttle between my cubicle and the electronics lab situated on the first floor. Meanwhile I noticed a innovative naming of a connector adapter...Oour SW team had a DB-9 male-female adapter, we call it the adapter. [The male/female terminology in connectors is used to differentiate the mating connector parts]. it was written on the adapter as "Gender Changer"... The name particularly amused me because of its different style of naming