The Amp Hour

By The Amp Hour (Chris Gammell and David L Jones)

The Amp Hour is a weekly conversation about electronics and the people who design them.... more

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FAQs about The Amp Hour:

How many episodes does The Amp Hour have?

The podcast currently has 745 episodes available.

The Amp Hour episodes:

September 29, 2020Knob and Tube Wiring
Want an Amazon Ring Drone in your house?
Dave is back in his old lab and his mic was not working.
Tel Aviv charging electric buses via the road?
3 classes of charger in Australia for EVs
240V * 10 A = 2400W
240V * 30A = 7200W
3 phase = 22 kW
Knob and tube wiring
CCS connector
Can you plug into most connectors? There are Type 1 and Type 2, with adapters.
Dave plans to review the protocol
Tesla Battery Day (summary) video
Buy or build a powerwall?
Chris has been reading "Hands-On RTOS with Microcontrollers: Building real-time embedded systems using FreeRTOS, STM32 MCUs, and SEGGER debug tools"
TV that turned off wifi to a UK village every morning for 18 months
Single high-level impulse noise (SHINE)
50% pre and post triggering
Bunnie has a new open source RISC V "phone" coming out soon, focused on security
Quectel plug in module (SA800UWF) with Android ready to go
8 Bit Guy reviews 108 obsolete types of media
Thank you to our Patrons for sponsoring this week's show! You can join them at Patreon.com/TheAmpHour. We'd also like to welcome our first corporate sponsor, Binho. Check out our interview with Binho founder Jonathan Georgino in episode 461.
...more
1h 10min
September 20, 2020Cellular IoT with Jared Wolff
Welcome Jared Wolff of Circuit Dojo!
Jared is a graduate of the Rochester Institute of Technology (which Chris also considered attending). He did co-ops while there, like we talked about on last week's episode.
While on co-op at Cisco, he was in the cable group and marveled at the techs doing repairs with magnet wire.
He is an east coast guy at heart, so he moved back to Connecticut eventually
Jared worked at Apple for a while, but the lifestyle is difficult because of time requirements and stressful travel. He was also there when Steve Jobs was still around and there was a bit of over the top hero worship.
Nordic's early bluetooth chipset was the nRF8001, which was a transceiver over SPI (no micro)
Working for startups was interesting if you thrive on doing a lot of different things
Burnt out on his last startup, decided to ride his motorcycle up and down the west coast. He got sick and ended up diagnosing himself with Valley Fever, a fungal infection prevalent in one of the places he visited.
After healing up, he went to Taiwan for 4-6 monhs.
There is a semiconductor fabrication program at RIT. There is a silicon ingot in a display case out front there.
While recovering from burnout, a previous mentor hit him up for the IoT project.
Mix of international and domestic manufacturing in his past
A lot of military nearby in CT
Comparison quotes with Taiwan, it was only a few dollars more for domestic production.
Currently building a board with an nRF9160 module, the new cellular module from Nordic Semiconductor.
Current status of nRF9160 is that it is shipping and working on different carriers throughout the world on Cat M1 networks.
What does it take to get a modem talking to towers?
Modems abstract commands in software
Jared will be testing for FCC, ISED, CE
Working with Resin
The cellular module is pre-certified but carriers still want you to test your design on their network.
Verizon requires over the air firmware capabilities, in case something goes wrong. The nRF91 firmware OTA is on the application side, which is unusual.
Jared is hoping the modem will have bluetooth at somepoint as well. The external wideband antenna he is using might be good enough.
Crowdfunding had an external antenna included.
There are different categories of cellular service. Most cellphones operate with Cat 4 or Cat 6 connections. The higher the category, the faster the speed.
Cat M1 is the slowest on LTE. NB-IOT is different equipment, so it isn't even considered to be LTE.
Based on the development from Nordic, Jared is using Zephyr to run his board.
It's an Real Time Operating System, but "feels" like linux for embedded. Zephyr is built on top of the chip's SDK. "West" is the downloader that pulls in necessary dependencies, based upon a definition file.
Huge library of boards available
Jared wrote a post on how to create your own drivers on Zephyr
The Device tree maintains swappability
The nRF91 board is based on the adafruit feather form factor. Jared had previously created the air quality wing, which had various sensors:
TVOC
Humidity / Temp
Particulate sensor
Compatibility matrix on the Nordic site
Chris recommends checking what kind of coverage you have with open signal.
Though the first board run is no longer for sale, some boards are available soon. You can get a discount on a board at jaredwolff.com/amphour
You can also follow along on Jared's progress on his blog, where he also writes about firmware tests.
...more
1h 6min
September 14, 2020Doomed To The Flatland
Today’s episode is sponsored by Mouser Electronics. They have been writing about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and how it impacts electronics designers, such as our listners. Paul Golata from Mouser Electronics talks with Chris during the ad break about how AI is changing the world for the better. To check out the free resources, including an eBook about AI, go to TheAmpHour.com/mouserai
We have discussed telepresence before
Chris was able to check out an X Ray machine at mHUB
Chris's first job was a co-op at Audiopack. This is where he met past guest Dave Young.
Audio is an odd field. Dave did a bunch of videos with Doug Ford before about the field.
Bird RF was another of Chris's past co-op jobs...but never learned RF while he was there.
Chris got his assembled boards back
EEVBlog video about optimizing for one machine
Video on reflowing QFN
Domestic vs international assembly costs
$4K hand pick and place machine
Chris interviewed Stephen Hawes on the Contextual Electronics Podcast, who is building a DIY pick and place
Mike's Electric Stuff has a great PnP setup because he knows to re-use parts so often
Mike also recently did a teardown video about an underwater radio
Chris recalls a talk about underwater electronics from 2017, from Nic Bingham
Pu pu platter
Chris recently got back from travel and posted a bunch of new Instagram photos
Dave has been posting more to Instagram as well, lately.
KiCon will be happening in a modified form this year. It will be a developer conversation on October 3rd. Submit questions on social media using the hashtag, #AskKiCadV6
For the 3 mistakes with layout video, Dave was attempting to install the Digikey library, but did not end up finding the part he wanted.
SnapEDA created a KiCad plugin
Check out this awesome photo of an optics table
https://twitter.com/CDBrownII/status/1303362656594571264
...more
1h 20min
August 31, 2020 Right To Repair with Louis Rossmann
Louis Rossmann from Rossmann Repair Group joins Dave to discuss Right To Repair legislation and repairability of products, and setting up an industry standard for independent repair.
Also moving his business, realestate, and Louis’s thoughts about what will happen to New York.
Louis’s Youtube Channel.
Right to Repair petition in Australia.
...more
1h 22min
August 25, 2020Hipster Fodder
Chris will be out the next few weeks, he'll be going on honeymoon!
Res Med
CPAP
10 year trends
Chris has found some tutors on Upwork for learning about FreeRTOS on the nRF52
Other platforms
Skills in teaching
Chris was having trouble with solderpaste application due to fixed stencils. Dave has done a video of stencil application.
Dave has been trying to track down a 1980s circuit design textbook that he used and enjoyed. He ended up talking on the phone with the 90 year old author.
Lab notebooks
SBIR grant programs. Past guests Zach Fredin and Michael Ossmann (we think) have been part of SBIR in the past.
The Fully Charged Show reviews the Arrival delivery van (already pre-sold 10K to UPS)
A designer's guide to fast lithium-ion battery charging
Dave has a Battery/Lithium playlist
Thanks to Wallpaper Flare for the picture of the hipster get-up
...more
1h 5min
August 17, 2020Hardware Revision Control with Kyle Dumont
Welcome, Kyle Dumont of Allspice!
Kyle has a background in EE and worked at iRobot.
After that he worked at Voxel8 on the Developer's Kit, the 3D printer that could do plastics plus circuits. You may remember a quadcopter that could fly off of the print bed.
Using a high end milling machine, they could get 100 micron trace/space. They did this by milling out the channel and filling with silver.
Things went quiet on the circuits front, so Voxel8 moved into rapidly printed footwear. Things like "stylized uppers"
First printer launched was called the developers kits and was good for doing things like 3D antennas and getting blind vias for free.
Kyle recently graduated from the new MS/MBA program at Harvard.
He mostly took CS / Datascience classes on the technical front, because of the availability of graduate level classes. So no exposure to Horowitz or Hill, unfortunately.
Kyle started Allspice with his classmate Valentina, as a way to make hardware design more like software.
Building a git release for hardware designs, instead of relying on zip files. This took direct cues from his experience doing product development.
Processes are built around the waterfall development process
When starting the EE team at Voxel, they used GitHub
What would you tell a new hire for using Git?
These days, younger EEs do firmware anyway.
How does git work?
Git allows design revision control
Different than Subversion, another revision control method used by Altium.
Git holds the entire history, and only tracks the incremental changes.
Separation between local and remote.
Jesse Vincent's talk at KiCon about tooling for manufacturing files
Using Continuous Integration
Simulation is usually super targeted, trying to get 4th order accuracy
Atul Gowande Checklist Manifesto
Tying footprints to MPN
Initial focus was on teams using git with hardware designs
Building visual red-lines, so that you can see what has changed during a design review.
Kyle can name the likelihood of a CAD program based on industry!
Altium building Altium365
Explaining how a change ripples out
Users of Git and Allspice will learn to break changes up into the most digestible changes
JEDEC30 format
Component information
Pull request is analogous to the ECO process
"Can this be done" vs "Should this be done"
Unit testing
How would this work with PCB manufacturing?
Tagging to put a version on a board. Chris used to put commit numbers on PCBs.
Check out Allspice for more info, or email Kyle directly
...more
1h 20min
August 10, 2020This Is Just A Tribute
We were four minutes into an episode when we realized we weren't recording. So this show is just a tribute.
Chris just launched the Contextual Electronics Podcast! There are already three episodes released, and another three recorded!
Sophy Wong
Stephen Hawes
Erik Larson
Chris uses Streamyard for recording video. We use Zencastr for The Amp Hour.
Cameras continue to improve...but don't have much effect on Dave and Chris
Eurocircuits has a great DfM tool because there's no human in the loop for checking your files
We wish that was the case for sales engineers as well...it's better when you don't need to talk to humans!
Chris has been dealing with gerber problems. Dave ended up making a video about this after this episode was recorded.
Gerber "aperture" is like an etch-a-sketch where light goes through a certain diameter hole to expose the pattern.
Dave has a new video about someone who created a similar design at the same time. We have discussed this once or twice before on the show.
"Technology transfer" when an employee goes from one company to another and a design concept follows them.
Intel sending work to TSMC. They also got rid of their lead engineer.
ARM is up for sale again. Apple suppliers are talking about purchasing, as are Nvidia.
Softbank has had some real duds lately, notably WeWork.
Arrow isn't buying IEEE GlobalSpec. They do own EETimes though.
Google is offering training courses that may lead to hiring for them. It will be as low as $300 and administered through Coursera.
Scott Galloway talks about how education and training will change on the Prof G show.
Brad Feld was on the Tim Ferriss podcast.
Shahriar did a great troubleshooting video last week, showing how to diagnose different RF sections.
The Ultimate Electronics online textbook has links out to 100+ simulations to showcase concepts.
Chris has been reading some new books lately:
The Baroque Cycle (fiction), a trilogy by Neal Stephenson
Hands-On RTOS with Microcontrollers
Ultralearning
Range
Dave has never watched...The Office??
...more
1h 13min
August 02, 2020Fabless Chip Design with Mohamed Kassem
Welcome Mohammed Kassem, CTO of eFabless!
This is well timed after we talked with Tim Ansell in episode 501 on about Google's announcement around the open source PDK.
OpenLANE was mentioned in that episode, but that is run by eFabless
Traditionally, the semi industry had been very closed. Small companies struggled to get a custom chip made, and it was still $500K to $1M to start.
When efabless started, they wanted to design in the browser
Was the open PDK the gating moment?
The PDK is the IP of the fab. eFabless uses the 130 nm PDK from Global Foundries, 80 nm from Sky Fab (which are not open).
Does it have to be on the browser? No, but that made it easier to deal with closed source IP.
Lots of people are working on it around the world, even at highGer latencies
Black box design / only knowing the input and output
eFabless offers both open and closed IP
Mohammed worked in smartphone chip development, starting in 2000. He designed chips for smartphones at TI. He saw that there can be as few as two people designing chips at a company, but the rest of the company is designing infrastructure that makes it possible. What if this infrastructure was outside of any one company?
He asked if it can look like an app store, since there would be small players who could access the resources and develop small ideas.
Was this a validated idea? Do engineers want this sort of thing?
Looked at Topcoder as an example from the software world. There were also data points from the open source world.
What is the volume for making a custom chip?
The first chip off the line costs the entire NRE. Each additional chip amortizes that up front cost. Need to sell enough to cover the NRE cost with the margin in the chip.
eFabless want to reduce the volume requirement so it's less of a hassle when someone is asking "Do I need an ASIC?"
That knowledge is residing on the IC side, so a system dev wouldn't consider doing it
Reasons for using an ASIC (after getting the costs down)
Size
Configurability
Security
Supply chain reliability
Obsolescence mitigation
Using the IP to pitch a startup idea to investors
Raven microcontroller uses the RISC V core by Claire Wolf. Raven isn't all open source (all the way down to the transistors), but a lot of it is.
Can clone an ARM chip on the platform, without needing to do much design. Anything with closed IP has to stay online.
With the openPDK, there is striVe SOC family. It has no analog on it at all.
Adding memory is like an FPGA using block ram
Mohammed will be doing a FOSSI dialup talk on Aug 25th
OpenROAD vs OpenLANE
OpenROAD can do 1M+ gates, previously was only 100K
GDS is "graphic design system". It is like gerbers all in one file, but also has thickness information.
Xfab - 350 nm for high voltage, 180 nm for normal
Global Foundries 130G, can do front end with it
What does it take to get a new fab onto their platform?
GDS is readable in any tool, but it's not as easy as it might be with large scale EDA
Start with design rules, which are in a PDF manual
Validating the designs and design rules is done against known designs. The number of layouts will go up a lot with the open source PDK, which is why getting more designs is important! This will allow people to push the rules
Analog process always trails digital
Hopefully this is all the beginning, with Skywater as a beachhead for convincing other fabs to open up.
Statistically speaking, more designs means more potential hits in the marketplace (for Skywater)
It's like a currency: convert IP to a process technology is valuable, but doesn't translate well to other places.
Parallel processing might be possible now that there are more people testing
Join the slack channel
The process requires a lot of knowledge, but wants to simplify the knowledge level
Try out your very own Raven configuration! Chris was able to do it with a few clicks during the recording.
The goal with OpenLANE is to get to no design rule errors
NEC wanted to work with Raven on parts and ended up customizing past the configuration tool online.
Learn more at eFabless.com
Join the Slack Channel to talk with others and get involved! invite.skywater.tools or join.skywater.tools
...more
1h 30min
July 26, 2020Lowest Common Denominator Design
Dave had a recent video about selecting different op amps for the microcurrent (maintaining engineering!)
ADI buying Maxim
Maxim sampling policy
Will there be a large amount of crossover parts?
Microchip sent out a letter asking for better visibility into the backlog
Boards with stackup
Video about reviewing PCBs of forum member
Chris borrowed an idea from past guest Luke Valenty about how to use pill shaped pads on the tinyfpga bx. This enables using a larger
Process for PCBs
"Lowest common denominator design" is the idea of choosing a PCB fab that has a very small space/trace, but only needing it for the
smallest chip.
CSP - Chip Scale Package
"Putting the EV in EEVblog" (looking at electric vehicles)
Dave bought a teardown report of the BMW i3 on Leandesign.com and it's awesome.
Forensic teardowns
Intel video inside the chip fab
We were sad to hear that Grant Imahara passed away last week. Watch his former co-host Adam Savage talk about memories of Grant.
Image from this video about fractions
...more
1h 18min
July 20, 2020Discussing the Open Source PDK with Tim Ansell
Welcome back, Tim ‘Mithro’ Ansell!
Tim has been on the show twice before:
First time was talking about microcontroller and making a device out of that
Second time was talking about FPGAs
Third time is looking at creating the ASIC
Tim says the next level down will be making the actual chips like Sam Zeloof, but he prefers bits to atoms.
Talk at Chaos with Bunnie about dabbling in the others' fields, like thinking about the lifetime of software (and applying quality engineering)
What is an open source PDK? Github repo
Three main components to building an IC
The RTL and design (code)
The tools - compiler / interpreter in SW
How does the physics work?
Called the PDK - process design kit
In machine readable form
Similar to the stackup of a PCB
Tim likes the tool SKiDL by past guest Dave Vandenbout.
Mike Englehardt has been on before talking about SPICE.
Why were PDKs secret before? Especially since it would be very hard to reverse engineer the PDK
In the 80s it was open, but it changed over time. Chris posits because of VC investment? Now it's cultural that the chip industry is not open
"Open source has won in the sofware world" and the arguments feel the same
QuickLogic officially supporting their tools with open source tools, as stated in a blog post by CEO Brian Faith
We are still taking entries to win a board from episode 500
RISC V ISA (instruction set architecture)
"The secret power of open source means engineers don't have to spend time talking to lawyers"
Open source standardizes legal equations
The ASIC world has many groups of lawyers
Only ideas that people are extremely confident about will get explored
Moore's law slowing down, compute needs growing
Taking risks is hard because of all the roadblocks
RISC V has opened up the ISA space to try exploring ideas that others had written off as bad ideas
Tim gave a FOSSi "Dial Up" talk, which we will refer to at different timestamps to discuss the slides he reviews.
Single core has flattened out for 10 years (7 minute mark on the video)
More cores needs more memory bandwidth
Power consumption issues
Tim is in a group the focuses on developer productivity at Google
That's why they're contributing to tools to make things faster
Security is also dependent upon how fast you can deploy changes
Making hardware accelerators using TPUs
Using machine learning to develop TPU
130 nm came out in 99 (26 minute mark)
The PDK and resulting silicon will be used for areas where cost > performance, like IoT.
Good for microcontroller, but not a high speed
Beagleboard has PRUs
They expect some users will make specialized devices, like putting a RISC V per pin or similar.
What's the plan for analog?
First thing released was digital standard cells, but they plan to publish low level transistor models, including parametric models. Unfortunately they are currently blocked on getting that work released.
What tools are available?
Similar to FPGA toolchain sides
First step for FPGA and ASIC is synthesis, like using Yosys (lead by Claire Wolf)
P&R is different
More freedom in ASICs
QFlow ASIC PNR (Tim Edwards)
FPGA PNR are different toolchains:
NextPNR (lead by Dave Shah)
VPR (grandfather of Quartus 2)
DARPA launched a program called IDEA (Andreas Olofsson), which resulted in another PNR for ASICs: The Open Road project
Tools for doing an open source flow
Submitted list by sine_osc
Magic (older than the BSD license!)
KLayout
SPICE
Xyce is fast
LTSpice used by LT designers
Schematic capture is still not easy (maybe KiCad?)
Google will be doing a free shuttle run for open source chips
Will be sending it to eFabless, they will bundle the shuttle
40 designs total (unless they get a large response)
Wafer chip scale package (CSP) 4x4mm
50 i/o, 40 will be for design
Might send back chips on castellated PCB
To get your design approved, it must be using the right license.
They will release a full list of licenses that will work, but Apache2 is guaranteed.
Also needs to pass DRC, which will be published in the repo soon.
Skywater PDK slack channel
Lottery system if they get more than 40 designs
Will be starting first run in Mid-November, Will be doing more runs after that.
Out of 16 mm^2, only 10 mm^2 is available. The rest will be for "the harness", a RISC V processor that can connect 'virtual GPIO' to turn things on or off.
As a reference for size, could probably fit 10 RISC V cores on the 10 mm^2
In contrast to MOSIS or Europractice, they want to fab out 100 - 400 of the chips so that they can share.
Slack channel skywater-pdk
J-Core, an SH based processor
Power PC is now an open ISA
Tim has published an Inspiration document.
If you're interested, you should join the mailing lists, especially the announce one.
The slack invite link is on the announce list. They will try to set up an invite bot for later.
Check out the FOSSi dial up talk series for future information about development.
Mohammed from eFabless will be giving a talk about Open Road and will be showcasing demo chips, which are currently out for manufacturing. These might act as good templates.
Need tutorials on all of the software (KLayout, MAGIC)
Project from University of Michigan, FASoC, treats analog design like digital design.
"Screaming inside their heart"
Craig Bishop episode
Adrian Tang episode
The physics act more ideally in the small space of silicon
Hoping to have a similar OSHpark for silicon
"Chips4makers" is one that is trying to make "the OSH Park for ASICs", but they are more focused on retrocomputing.
Trying to seed and build an ecosystem
"The things that will be most successful in this space will be those that build on each other and work together"
Traditional ASIC designers should be prepared to do thing differntly
Can open source be profitable? IBM bought Red Hat for $30B
The next wave of software is "software AND", the hardware is just a means to an end
Contact Tim directly: [email protected]
Better to go on the slack and ask there
...more
2h 18min

FAQs about The Amp Hour:

How many episodes does The Amp Hour have?

The podcast currently has 745 episodes available.

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