Archive for October, 2006

Oct 26 2006

Killing two (or three and perhaps four) birds with one stone

Published by The Fake Engineer at 2:59 am under Class, Research

It turns out that I can take the amplifier I made in the first project, add a compensation cap somewhere, make minor changes to the amplifier to get enough gain and swing, and I’ll be pretty much done with the second project.
Amazing, isn’t it? It looks like internal shunt feedback will save my project butt [...]

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Oct 25 2006

Wah. Group meeting tomorrow. Why?

Published by The Fake Engineer at 9:35 pm under Research

I only have half-ideas that don’t go anywhere.
UPDATE: It’s 3:30am on 10/26, I am looking at my presentation slides, and I am surprised I managed to write some decent BS. I feel good about this. My half-ideas still don’t go anywhere, but that’s okay. At least I’ve been able to eliminate those half-ideas from future [...]

2 responses so far

Oct 24 2006

Just wow

Published by The Fake Engineer at 11:11 pm under Class, Research, Stupid Stuff

http://designers-guide.org/
No analog designer is complete without this site. I’m so impressed that I added this site to the links on the right.

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Oct 18 2006

Yahoo! and MSN just joined Google’s lameness

Published by The Fake Engineer at 9:09 pm under Blog Junk

http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=vdsat&fr=yfp-t-501&toggle=1&cop=mss&ei=UTF-8
http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=vdsat&FORM=MSNH
Meanwhile, Google summarizes my page quite nicely:

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Oct 18 2006

Classic foolishness

Published by The Fake Engineer at 8:47 pm under Class, Stupid Stuff

During a 5 minute break today in class, I was discussing a project with someone. Not realizing that the whole class fell silent and the professor was about to continue with his lecture, I blurted out in my classic dumbheadedness…
WHY MAKE IT MORE COMPLICATED THAN IT NEEDS TO BE!?
I turned towards the front of the [...]

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Oct 14 2006

I am having waaay too much fun

Published by The Fake Engineer at 7:13 am under Class

It is 7:08am, I didn’t sleep at all.
I scrapped my circuit and completely redesigned it. The number of transistors is now 15, down from 33. Area was reduced by approximately a factor of 10. This amplifier completely blows everything else out of the water.
New amp specs:
Bandwidth: 41.25MHz
Gain: 57.91dB
Power: 637.1uW (will end up around 650uW when [...]

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Oct 12 2006

Classic picture

Published by The Fake Engineer at 2:40 am under Stupid Stuff

For your viewing pleasure. If you don’t get it, don’t worry about it. It is a shame that I didn’t get a picture of spice monkey with Itail.
UPDATE: It just occurred to me that his has been my wallpaper for the last 3 months.

3 responses so far

Oct 08 2006

There goes my sweater

Published by The Fake Engineer at 12:14 am under Stupid Stuff

Today is a sad, sad day. A hole was already forming. The washing machine finally did it in today. Looks like my oversized Berkeley sweater is next up in line.

2 responses so far

Oct 07 2006

The value of a domain name

Published by The Fake Engineer at 3:02 am under Blog Junk

Seriously no joke.
I must conclude that Google’s search algorithm is flawed. The lame blog of a grad student should not be the number one search result for “vdsat.” This blog is not the number one search result on Yahoo or MSN and that’s the way it should be. Imagine a confused analog student somewhere Googling [...]

One response so far

Oct 06 2006

Pathetic design review

Published by The Fake Engineer at 1:30 am under Class

I had to give a little design review to a TA today…
TA: Hmm, 1.54mW. That’s pretty good. And you’re meeting the corners. But 33 transistors? Apparently you’ve had some circuit design experience, but this is overkill for this project.
Me: Hey man, the figure of merit doesn’t include the number of transistors.
TA: Well the specs can [...]

No responses yet

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