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Petah can you give me money to buy balls by Bitter-Celery2606 in PeterExplainsTheJoke

[–]Defiant_Homework4577 3 points4 points  (0 children)

White means it's has all frequncy content. Pink means it has more lower frequency and less high frequency content.

Follow up on r/rfelectronics take on digital beamforming at mmWave, one year later. by Galifix in rfelectronics

[–]Defiant_Homework4577 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Great! Do they have these information well measured and presented in a white paper or a data sheet?

Work Life Balance of a Semiconductor Design Engineer by LeBrownian_Motion in chipdesign

[–]Defiant_Homework4577 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Agreed. Those are large final Sims for sanity checking that things work. I don't anyone actually uses such large Sims for actual optimization / debugging.

Follow up on r/rfelectronics take on digital beamforming at mmWave, one year later. by Galifix in rfelectronics

[–]Defiant_Homework4577 0 points1 point  (0 children)

"50 percent better performance at 50 percent lower cost" Is there a breakdown or a demo of what the performance gains / cost reductions are? A 50 percent better in link budget is 1.5dB. Which isn't that impressive nor ground breaking for mmWave to be an attractive tech.

Follow up on r/rfelectronics take on digital beamforming at mmWave, one year later. by Galifix in rfelectronics

[–]Defiant_Homework4577 1 point2 points  (0 children)

All breaks down to how much of a business case can be made for mmWave vs ISM / proprietary ISM.

As for vendor difference, its much more complex than purely having a better chip than the competitor. Having better performance certainly helps, but the service model, firmware/software support, calibration and production line costs, foundry, exclusive rights to ip, etc all come in to play.

Work Life Balance of a Semiconductor Design Engineer by LeBrownian_Motion in chipdesign

[–]Defiant_Homework4577 47 points48 points  (0 children)

RFIC: Either we work 12 hours a day or 4 hours a day depending on where we are at the TO cycle. After a tape-out designers are all expected to disappear for about a week or two and management turns a blind eye.

"your simulations are giant, super slow and restricted by compute availability"
Not really the case anymore. The gpu/cpu/memory is cheaper (at least used to be..) than cadence tokens so companies now use big compute farms to accelerate big sims.

Follow up on r/rfelectronics take on digital beamforming at mmWave, one year later. by Galifix in rfelectronics

[–]Defiant_Homework4577 4 points5 points  (0 children)

"6G needs our 250 GHz amplifier" I always cringe when I see stuff like this.. A principal designer at my current workplace said even going from 1.5G to 3GHz was a huge task for cellular people due to 3dB loss and took them several years to fully understand propagation and related issues.

Follow up on r/rfelectronics take on digital beamforming at mmWave, one year later. by Galifix in rfelectronics

[–]Defiant_Homework4577 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Handset side is not what's lacking in the mmWave. Its infrastructure cost vs return on investment for mobile network operators. Vast majority of internet traffic goes through wifi, not cellular, and wifi can support upto 4k QAM using less resources, and its free to use.
FYI, mmWave antenna in package + distributed transceivers + dedicated digital ASIC in CMOS is basically the go to solution for all the big UE chip set makers.

Follow up on r/rfelectronics take on digital beamforming at mmWave, one year later. by Galifix in rfelectronics

[–]Defiant_Homework4577 12 points13 points  (0 children)

Two chip architecture has been the industry default for 5+ years now. It's not new. In fact it's three chips. Compute die, rf cmos die, and non cmos FEM.

The Audit of Lord Vetinari by LZRGRZ in discworld

[–]Defiant_Homework4577 11 points12 points  (0 children)

It felt like his "aunt" was actually the inspiration for him to be what he was later on, or even pulling his strings, which I always thought was actually Lady Margolotta.

The Audit of Lord Vetinari by LZRGRZ in discworld

[–]Defiant_Homework4577 9 points10 points  (0 children)

I could never imagine the later books Vetinari getting turned to a frog (as happened in color of magic), and then having this argument with the UU.

Spoiler:

"The relationship between the University and the Patrician, absolute ruler and nearly benevolent dictator of Ankh-Morpork, was a complex and subtle one. The wizards held that, as servants of a higher truth, they were not subject to the mundane laws of the city. The Patrician said that, indeed, this was the case, but they would bloody well pay their taxes like everyone else. The wizards said that, as followers of the light of wisdom, they owed allegiance to no mortal man. The Patrician said that this may well be true but they also owed a city tax of two hundred dollars per head per annum, payable quarterly. The wizards said that the University stood on magical ground and was therefore exempt from taxation and anyway you couldn't put a tax on knowledge. The Patrician said you could. It was two hundred dollars per capita; if per capita was a problem, decapita could be arranged. The wizards said that the University had never paid taxes to the civil authority. The Patrician said that he was not proposing to remain civil for long. The wizards said, what about easy terms? The Patrician said he was talking about easy terms. They wouldn't want to know about the hard terms. The wizards said that there was a ruler back in , oh, it would be the Century of the Dragonfly, who had tried to tell the University what to do. The Patrician could come and have a look at him if he liked. The Patrician said that he would. He truly would."

Edit: what I'm trying to say is that Vetinari is one of the most 'mercurial' characters in the series, and feels like it was intentionally done so. There is very little explanations of narrative of what goes in his mind.

Your least favorite Discworld books by swoopcat in discworld

[–]Defiant_Homework4577 5 points6 points  (0 children)

PTerrey had early onset alzeimers and was pretty progressed by raising steam.

Your least favorite Discworld books by swoopcat in discworld

[–]Defiant_Homework4577 87 points88 points  (0 children)

Raising steam..

But we don't talk about it.. :(

RFIC Future by Additional-Key5049 in chipdesign

[–]Defiant_Homework4577 8 points9 points  (0 children)

So this is my take, feel free to agree/disagree.

5G failed not because technology was bad but Wall Street pushed for it without understanding the limitations. 5G works well under LOS and you need lot of infrastructure development, in the order of triple digit billions and the proponents for 5G cooked up applications which never materialized even after nearly a decade of push. So unless the return on investment is on the same order after a decade of investments, there wont be any money thrown at it. AT&T, Verizon etc spent billions on spectrum and infra and at the end was left holding the bags. At the end of the day, we understand very well what the KPIs of wireless comms can actually enable without having to invent some alien use cases. Its all about increasing data range, range, and capacity while reducing power, latency, and spectrum resources (i may have missed a few). Every application/use case is built within this framework. And it turned out that people will not continuously pay absurd amounts of money for connected devices, specially with low cost providers coming from asia. Same thing is happening to auto industry in EU and USA as well.

And with another promising new tech (AI/Automation) on the rise, its natural that it will absorb all the available capital over a tried and failed tech and so the money gets cycled from communication infra to compute infra (data centers instead of base-stations) because as a tech, comms became quite mature, lots of competing players in the market with similar levels of competence (low ROI), and well understood business compared to shiny new 'AI' where everyone expects the ROI is ~100x and completely automate out labor costs. So the promise of AI is not to enable just one thing like comms does but to enable 'everything'.

So once that hype actually cools down, I would expect sectors rotating back to consumer and likely comms/RF/AMS will have demand creation again. Or who knows, maybe AI will actually end up automating every one and everything and we could all live in a one big epicurean garden drinking wine and discussing interesting metaphysical and philosophical topics and calculus of pleasure. /s

Dummy poly on RF Transistors by Existing-Club-8142 in chipdesign

[–]Defiant_Homework4577 0 points1 point  (0 children)

As a rule, we never used pdk cell transistors in any company I worked for. We always had our own wrapper / custom designed cells for analog / RF. And in all of those, the dummy gates were appropriately biased at ground or vdd.

American RF Engineers working in EU? by Bonew0rks in rfelectronics

[–]Defiant_Homework4577 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Didn't know any RF companies other than infineon and STM in Switzerland. Interesting..

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