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proper response?

J

Jim Thompson

Jan 1, 1970
0
God damn you can be dense.


Nah, his simple and basic wish is to run his mouth because he's
entertained by the responses.

Most people, including cyclists, are simply going to see a feeble old
man with an ignorant and bad attitude. He'll mostly be laughed at --
those are the responses he doesn't see/hear. None of those people
will know Jim is a talented engineer. None could care less. And it
is because it really doesn't matter.

Ignorant/rude responses, such as yours, ensure that I will use my
legal muscle to require licenses and enforce citations.

So there, you ****-head ;-)

...Jim Thompson
 
J

Jim Thompson

Jan 1, 1970
0
Jim Thompson said:
message news:[email protected]... [snip]

Read page 14 thoroughly ;-)

...Jim Thompson

You mean the "...believed to have been first used". :)

Robert H.


Yup. That's yours truly ;-)

...Jim Thompson

Lucky man.

Robert H.

Why do you say "Lucky" ??

...Jim Thompson

That work situation wasn't accidental?

Robert H.

Now I get your gist. The way it happened is I was already at Motorola
Semiconductor Products Division, Tom was at some military contractor
in southern California, but got laid off.

Moto hired him and the only space was in my double-wide cubicle.

...Jim Thompson
 
J

Jeff Liebermann

Jan 1, 1970
0
John Larkin said:
I just finished designing another board, a waveform generator, and I
asked one of my guys, my most-recent hire actually, to look it over
before we gerber it. He said "I really don't have my head into what I
was doing, so I'll take a day or so and give it a full check assuming
that it was designed by an idiot."

What should I have replied to a statement like that?
John

You should thank him. I've designed a few things in my career and had
great difficulties getting anyone to spend the time reviewing the
design or implementation. Everyone was busy and nobody had the time
to do it. You'll find that feedback, in any form should be welcomed,
not defended against. Look at it this way. If it works, YOU are the
hero. If it's a better design as a result of peer review, then YOU
still get the credit.

How a person packages their criticism or review should not be a
consideration. Most of the people I respect are arrogant, self
centered, egotistical, tactless, demanding, and short tempered. That's
mostly a defense mechanism against getting overloaded with excessive
work. If you did your part of the design in a reasonable manner,
you'll probably get the respect you deserve. If you made a mess of
things, you'll be the first to know.

Much more important is what to do when he actually delivers a proper
detailed design review. If you go on the defensive, you'll never get
him to look at your design again. He's just declare it to be a waste
of his time as you aren't really interesting in listening to his
comments.

More appropriate would be to listen carefully, do NOT pass judgment,
thank him profusely for his efforts, and sneak off into a corner
somewhere to objectively consider his comments. Even if you don't
take any of his changes as useful, he also deserves some feedback. If
you like one of his ideas, but don't have the time to implement it,
then tell him so.

As for his rather odd statement, I suspect you may be reading it out
of context. I analyze everything based on the assumption that
everything is wrong until calculated otherwise. The most common
mistakes are the result of bad assumptions. By assuming that all the
calcs and design work was done wrong, I get to check both the calcs
and the assumptions. Most often, the calcs are correct, but the
assumption that they are based upon are wrong. If you assume that it
was designed by an idiot, the assumption float to the surface where
they can be inspected.
 
U

UltimatePatriot

Jan 1, 1970
0
You should thank him. I've designed a few things in my career and had
great difficulties getting anyone to spend the time reviewing the
design or implementation. Everyone was busy and nobody had the time
to do it. You'll find that feedback, in any form should be welcomed,
not defended against. Look at it this way. If it works, YOU are the
hero. If it's a better design as a result of peer review, then YOU
still get the credit.

How a person packages their criticism or review should not be a
consideration. Most of the people I respect are arrogant, self
centered, egotistical, tactless, demanding, and short tempered. That's
mostly a defense mechanism against getting overloaded with excessive
work. If you did your part of the design in a reasonable manner,
you'll probably get the respect you deserve. If you made a mess of
things, you'll be the first to know.

Much more important is what to do when he actually delivers a proper
detailed design review. If you go on the defensive, you'll never get
him to look at your design again. He's just declare it to be a waste
of his time as you aren't really interesting in listening to his
comments.

More appropriate would be to listen carefully, do NOT pass judgment,
thank him profusely for his efforts, and sneak off into a corner
somewhere to objectively consider his comments. Even if you don't
take any of his changes as useful, he also deserves some feedback. If
you like one of his ideas, but don't have the time to implement it,
then tell him so.

As for his rather odd statement, I suspect you may be reading it out
of context. I analyze everything based on the assumption that
everything is wrong until calculated otherwise. The most common
mistakes are the result of bad assumptions. By assuming that all the
calcs and design work was done wrong, I get to check both the calcs
and the assumptions. Most often, the calcs are correct, but the
assumption that they are based upon are wrong. If you assume that it
was designed by an idiot, the assumption float to the surface where
they can be inspected.


Excellent response! Quite the proper action(s) as well.
 
J

John Larkin

Jan 1, 1970
0
You might want to hold off on PADS2007 for a bit then. There's been some
complaining on the support forum about incorrect Gerber's in some
situations. I'll see if I can find the comments if you're interested.

Robert H.

We dropped off the support/upgrade bandwagon when it became obvious
that Mentor would wreck PADS. When they started offering courses to
longtime users on how to use the new version of Logic, we were outta
there.

PowerPCB V5.0 (July 2002) seems like a perfect PC layout program, so
all they can do is break it.

John
 
J

John Larkin

Jan 1, 1970
0
You should thank him.


I did! I wanted him to find all possible mistakes, which he can only
do if he assumes I can make all possible mistakes. Which I can!

John
 
J

Jeff Liebermann

Jan 1, 1970
0
John Larkin said:
I did! I wanted him to find all possible mistakes, which he can only
do if he assumes I can make all possible mistakes. Which I can!

John

Well, that's a good start, but not sufficient. During the late
1990's, I was doing some design reviews for former employers that had
successfully overloaded their engineering staffs and were forced to
hire outside consultants. I learned how it was done the hard way.

One person can do a tolerable design review, but it's much better to
have a "team" of people look at a design. It's the same as with any
team effort. The participants competative pressure push each other
along until the results are much better than if they had worked
individually.

It's also a good idea to get manufacturing involved early in the
design review. They may not know anything about electronic design,
but they sure know that you can't hang components over the edge of a
board, or use top heavy parts that require hand insertion, or want to
deal with awkwardly milled boards, or a thousand other things that
only ocurr in passing to the average design engineer.

Formality is also a major impediment. Far better results were
obtained with engineers over pizza and beer than in the corporate
boardroom with the managers pretending to be helpful. If the results
look promising, you might want to go somewhere with your new found
accomplis, and discuss some of his logic and reasoning.

The most difficult part is to recognize the difference between
implimentation selection and a bad approach. Neigher is totally
wrong, but both involve alternatives which may not necessarily be any
better. For example, I might decide to use some some sole source
vendors magic bullet chip, instead of a more expensive, but more
commonly available discrete solution. To the design engineer, the
integrated solution offers substantial benifits in consistency and
production variations. To purchasing and production, the sole source
may soon become a major problem if the vendor decides to obsolete the
product or delay chip production because it's insufficiently popular.
So, which is the best implimentation? Well, it depends on what the
designer and reviewers consider important. No, it's not a coin toss.
 
R

Robert

Jan 1, 1970
0
John Larkin said:
We dropped off the support/upgrade bandwagon when it became obvious
that Mentor would wreck PADS. When they started offering courses to
longtime users on how to use the new version of Logic, we were outta
there.

PowerPCB V5.0 (July 2002) seems like a perfect PC layout program, so
all they can do is break it.

John

Yeah, a lot of users on the Forum say that. Did you install the Service
Pack(s) for that version or just use as is?

Did you hear that they charge you something like 60% (IIRC) of the
Maintenance price for the time you were off to get back on? Plus the regular
Maintenance fee.

Robert H.
 
R

Robert

Jan 1, 1970
0
Jim Thompson said:
Jim Thompson said:
message [snip]

Read page 14 thoroughly ;-)

...Jim Thompson

You mean the "...believed to have been first used". :)

Robert H.


Yup. That's yours truly ;-)

...Jim Thompson

Lucky man.

Robert H.


Why do you say "Lucky" ??

...Jim Thompson

That work situation wasn't accidental?

Robert H.

Now I get your gist. The way it happened is I was already at Motorola
Semiconductor Products Division, Tom was at some military contractor
in southern California, but got laid off.

Moto hired him and the only space was in my double-wide cubicle.

...Jim Thompson

Yep. That was the luck I meant. Paired up (at least in the same cube) with a
guy where you could bat ideas back and forth like that.

Robert H.
 
L

legg

Jan 1, 1970
0
We never check gerbers. We do look over the board pretty hard while
still in in PADS, with pretty colors, especially for signal integrity
and mechanical issues. PADS seems to handle connectivity and design
rule checks perfectly, and makes correct gerbers every time.

One issue I've seen with PADS is in schematic entry. What you see is
not necessarily what you get - a trace can appear to be connected,
without sharing the correct net. You have to query every single one to
be sure.

Schematic 'errors', of course, go through the other processes like
grease through a pig.

Another issue I have is with drill and pad detail. Firstly, no attempt
is made to produce representative scale drill work in the art - so
you'd best check the DD of the gerbers, if you don't want surprises.
This issue with scale actually applies to the traces and patterns
themselves - so I count on printed gerbers to tell me what the board
vendor will see. Producing different pad art on varying layers, or
thermal relief differing from the default is both error-prone and
frequently impossible, given the choices offered in the GUI.

It sure ain't art, not by a long shot.

RL
 
J

John Larkin

Jan 1, 1970
0
One issue I've seen with PADS is in schematic entry. What you see is
not necessarily what you get - a trace can appear to be connected,
without sharing the correct net. You have to query every single one to
be sure.

I've never seen that happen. PADS-Logic, unlike some other schematic
programs, simply doesn't allow dangling line segments on a schematic.
You can't draw a line that near-misses another net, and if you delete
any segment of a connection, the entire thing vanishes.

I did notice this problem on older versions of Orcad, near-miss
connections, but that was a long time ago.
Schematic 'errors', of course, go through the other processes like
grease through a pig.

The only hazard we see is the strangely-named "signal pins" which are,
in fact, invisible power and ground pins. If a part is created with a
hidden pin named "+3.3V" but you really want to power it from "+3.5V",
from a separate regulator maybe, you've got to check that carefully.
Another issue I have is with drill and pad detail. Firstly, no attempt
is made to produce representative scale drill work in the art - so
you'd best check the DD of the gerbers, if you don't want surprises.
This issue with scale actually applies to the traces and patterns
themselves - so I count on printed gerbers to tell me what the board
vendor will see. Producing different pad art on varying layers, or
thermal relief differing from the default is both error-prone and
frequently impossible, given the choices offered in the GUI.

Again, we don't see a problem here. Traces and pads are shown on the
screen drawn to scale, on all the proper layers, as are drills. We
don't look at gerbers, we don't prototype, we go directly to
multilayer pcb's, and most of our stuff is sellable at rev "A", the
first etch. I can't remember a time when PADS itself caused a problem,
or even crashed.


John
 
J

Jim Thompson

Jan 1, 1970
0
Jim Thompson said:
message On Sat, 25 Aug 2007 21:34:43 -0700, "Robert" <[email protected]>
wrote:


message [snip]

Read page 14 thoroughly ;-)

...Jim Thompson

You mean the "...believed to have been first used". :)

Robert H.


Yup. That's yours truly ;-)

...Jim Thompson

Lucky man.

Robert H.


Why do you say "Lucky" ??

...Jim Thompson

That work situation wasn't accidental?

Robert H.

Now I get your gist. The way it happened is I was already at Motorola
Semiconductor Products Division, Tom was at some military contractor
in southern California, but got laid off.

Moto hired him and the only space was in my double-wide cubicle.

...Jim Thompson

Yep. That was the luck I meant. Paired up (at least in the same cube) with a
guy where you could bat ideas back and forth like that.

Robert H.

One of the many circuits I came up with, with Tom betting I couldn't
do it, was the "Thompson" Current Mirror in....

http://analog-innovations.com/SED/EnhancedCurrentMirrors.pdf

Another was...

http://analog-innovations.com/SED/MC1554-DataSheet.pdf

a co-design with Tom.

...Jim Thompson
 
N

Nico Coesel

Jan 1, 1970
0
Jim Thompson said:
We have designated bike lanes on many streets here... it's a leftist
weenies thing... like it's saving significant gasoline ;-)

But the pansies won't stay single file in them. They insist on riding
as many a 5-abreast.

Weird how that sickness spreads around the globe. Over here these guys
and girls can be a real menace because they think they own the road.
 
C

ChairmanOfTheBored

Jan 1, 1970
0
I did! I wanted him to find all possible mistakes, which he can only
do if he assumes I can make all possible mistakes. Which I can!


Like the one where you think you know how to properly use a vapor phase
degreaser machine.
 
N

Nico Coesel

Jan 1, 1970
0
Fred Bloggs said:
That sounds like a lot of duplication of effort. The parts library
should be well verified beforehand, both in schematic entry and the PCB
layout. You should have reason to be confident in the DRC verification
of the schematic to layout verification as well as its other features
like finding shorts or illegal connections like output to output, as
well as all the other physical rules checking, if not, you should be
using another product. This leaves only two sources of human error: a
bad schematic or bad routing vulnerable to crosscoupling or some other
kind of interference or possibly abuse of a component.

Or a broken computer... Bad memory can do weird things to a PCB design
and you won't notice it until the board is on your bench.
 
J

John Larkin

Jan 1, 1970
0
Like the one where you think you know how to properly use a vapor phase
degreaser machine.

I didn't buy it and I don't use it. I hire people to manufacture
things, so I can spend my time designing. Thirty million dollars worth
of clean boards later, I'm not complaining.

But OK, tell us the proper way to use a "vapor degreaser" to clean
flux off of production PC boards.

John
 
U

UltimatePatriot

Jan 1, 1970
0
Or a broken computer... Bad memory can do weird things to a PCB design
and you won't notice it until the board is on your bench.


That's why you should use ECC memory in a CAD workstation.
 
T

Terry Given

Jan 1, 1970
0
Jim said:
message
message
[snip]

Read page 14 thoroughly ;-)

...Jim Thompson

You mean the "...believed to have been first used". :)

Robert H.


Yup. That's yours truly ;-)

...Jim Thompson

Lucky man.

Robert H.


Why do you say "Lucky" ??

...Jim Thompson

That work situation wasn't accidental?

Robert H.


Now I get your gist. The way it happened is I was already at Motorola
Semiconductor Products Division, Tom was at some military contractor
in southern California, but got laid off.

Moto hired him and the only space was in my double-wide cubicle.

...Jim Thompson

Yep. That was the luck I meant. Paired up (at least in the same cube) with a
guy where you could bat ideas back and forth like that.

Robert H.


One of the many circuits I came up with, with Tom betting I couldn't
do it, was the "Thompson" Current Mirror in....

http://analog-innovations.com/SED/EnhancedCurrentMirrors.pdf

I lIke it! best of all, I can make them with my favourite dual
transistor, the BC847BPN.....
Another was...

http://analog-innovations.com/SED/MC1554-DataSheet.pdf

a co-design with Tom.

...Jim Thompson

Cheers
Terry
 
T

Terry Given

Jan 1, 1970
0
John said:
I've never seen that happen. PADS-Logic, unlike some other schematic
programs, simply doesn't allow dangling line segments on a schematic.
You can't draw a line that near-misses another net, and if you delete
any segment of a connection, the entire thing vanishes.

I did notice this problem on older versions of Orcad, near-miss
connections, but that was a long time ago.




The only hazard we see is the strangely-named "signal pins" which are,
in fact, invisible power and ground pins. If a part is created with a
hidden pin named "+3.3V" but you really want to power it from "+3.5V",
from a separate regulator maybe, you've got to check that carefully.

I never, ever have hidden pins. spent too much time faffing around with
this sort of problem.
Again, we don't see a problem here. Traces and pads are shown on the
screen drawn to scale, on all the proper layers, as are drills. We
don't look at gerbers, we don't prototype, we go directly to
multilayer pcb's, and most of our stuff is sellable at rev "A", the
first etch. I can't remember a time when PADS itself caused a problem,
or even crashed.


John

I worked on one design in the US, done in PADS, that had some serious
problems. The layout guy was a contractor (and a fairly crap one). We
fixed some problems, and got him to spin a new rev. When I was debugging
it, I found an inner-layer trace shorted to chassis. turns out he'd
dragged the trace, right thru a (thru-plated) mounting hole. At which
point alarm bells started ringing. So I asked about the DRC, and got an
odd response - basically dissembling, about how it was "too hard".
Turned out the schematic had been drawn up, then the PCB laid out
*without* netlisting etc - the PCB was essentially hand-drawn. As such,
NONE of the automatically generated net names matched up, so the DRC
gave a zillion errors - and thus got ignored.

I made him fix it. turned out to be a serious PITA, as (at that stage)
PADS couldnt automagically re-assign net names. So Ralph had to do it
manually - it took about 2 days, and in the process we found several
other glaring mistakes. Needless to say, I was gobsmacked, having never
before (or since) seen such a misuse of CAD tools.

mind you, a young techie did a layout for a tester me, his first PCB. He
DRC'd it, said all was fine and we built it. During debug, he had some
problems, so I helped him figure out what was wrong - and found several
tracks were missing:

"did you DRC it?"

"yep"

"show me"

He DRC'd it all right; Protel comes with with a "DRC completed" box,
with a big OK button. And created a DRC file with 5,000 violations, but
didnt automatically open it. He clicked "OK".....

so it was entirely my fault!

(later versions of protel (AKA no-go-tel) noiw open the DRC file....)

Cheers
Terry
 
M

Michael A. Terrell

Jan 1, 1970
0
Nico said:
Weird how that sickness spreads around the globe. Over here these guys
and girls can be a real menace because they think they own the road.


I have encountered them riding eight abreast, across both lanes of a
rural two lane highway. Lots of blind curves, and a 55 MPH speed
limit. Its a wonder most of them weren't killed.


--
Service to my country? Been there, Done that, and I've got my DD214 to
prove it.
Member of DAV #85.

Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida
 
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