EEs Talk Tech - An Electrical Engineering Podcast

How’s the impedance of your ground plane? Do you look at your power rails in the frequency domain? Mike Hoffman and Daniel Bogdanoff sit down with power integrity expert Kenny Johnson to discuss the latest trends and techniques for measuring power supplies in today’s electrical engineering podcast. https://eestalktech.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/power-integrity-and-signal-integrity-ees-talk-tech-electrical-engineering-podcast.mp3 00:15 Kenny gave us a tip during scope month 01:26 There are two types of power people. There are power producers, like the wind farms, power plants, and AC/DC adapter creators There are power consumers, who care very much about their power quality. The ripple on power supplies, etc. 3:03 Power integrity is the study of the effectiveness of the conversion and delivery of DC power from the source to the gates on the IC. 3:45 If Moore’s Law holds out for another 600 years, we will have a computer that is capable of simulating every atom in the known universe. 4:35 Thermal hotspots were causing problems, so voltage levels started dropping 5:00 Kenny went to Amazon to look for a power integrity book. There were only 2-3 books a few years ago Power integrity has been a thing since the 1930s 5:50 Product functional reliability is directly proportional to the power quality in a product. We’re supplying a voltage to devices, but also current. So, this starts to look a lot like Ohm’s law. A device has both power and a ground plane. Power integrity pioneers include Istvan Novak and Ray Ridley and they talk about flat impedance power planes. 7:15 Flat impedance power planes – divide the supply power by the peak current, multiply it by your tolerance, you get a target impedance for your power planes. If you can maintain a frequency flat impedance, you don’t see noise on your power supplies. 7:55 Think back to circuits 101, an inductor is open at a high frequency. And, a power plane is basically a big inductor. If you are, for example, writing high speed digital data to memory, it will be a problem. 8:40 When you look at boards, you see bypass capacitors to counteract the inductors 10:30 Experienced engineers use a lot of intuition when working out power distribution. Now, there’s a lot of localized power distribution. 11:15 A typical SSD has 12 power supplies A tablet can have 50 power supplies Some of our oscilloscopes have 180 power supply rails Next generation mobile electronics 100-200 power supplies 12:25 There are redundant power supplies spread out across the device to help improve reliability. For example, there may be multiple converters that all power the same rail to help spread the loads. The reason intuition is used is that a lot of people don’t have access to good simulation tools. They just have to use some

Today’s systems simply can’t communicate any faster. Learn how some companies are getting creative and doubling their data rates using PAM4 – and the extra challenge this technology means for engineers. Mike Hoffman and Daniel Bogdanoff sit down with PAM4 transmitter expert Alex Bailes and PAM4 receiver expert Steve Reinhold to discuss the trends, challenges, and rewards of this technology.   https://eestalktech.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/pam4-and-400g-ethernet-ees-talk-tech-electrical-engineering-podcast-18.mp3 1:00 PAM isn’t just cooking spray. What is PAM4? PAM stands for Pulse Amplitude Modulation, and is a serial data communication technique in which more than one bit of data can be communicated per clock cycle. Instead of just a high (1) or low (0) value, a in PAM4, a voltage level can represent 00, 01, 10, or 11. NRZ is essentially just PAM2. We are reaching the limit of NRZ communication capabilities over the current communication channels. 2:10 PAM has been around for a while, it was used in 1000BASE-T. 10GBASE-T uses PAM16, which means it has 16 different possible voltage levels per clock cycle. It acts a bit like an analog to digital converter. 2:55 Many existing PAM4 specifications have voltage swings of 600-800 mV 3:15 What does a PAM4 receiver look like?  A basic NRZ receiver just needs a comparator, but what about multiple levels? 3:40 Engineers add multiple slicers and do post-processing to clean up the data or put an ADC at the receiver and do the data analysis all at once. PAM4 communicates 2-bits per clock cycle, 00, 01, 10, or 11. 4:25 Radio engineers have been searching for better modulation techniques for some time, but now digital people are starting to get interested. 4:40 With communications going so fast, the channel bandwidth limits the ability to transmit data. PAM4 allows you to effectively double your data rate by doubling the amount of data per clock cycle. 5:05 What’s the downside of PAM4? The Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) for PAM4  worse than traditional NRZ. In a perfect world, the ideal SNR would be 9.6 dB (for four levels instead of two). In reality, it’s worse, though. 5:30 Each eye may not be the same height, so that also has an effect on the total SNR. 6:05 What’s the bit error ratio (BER) of a PAM4 vs. NRZ signal if the transmission channel doesn’t change? 6:45 The channels were already challenged, even for many NRZ signals. So, it doesn’t look good for PAM4 signals. Something has to change. 7:00 PAM4 is designed to operate at a high BER. NRZ typically specified a 1E-12 or 1E-15 BER, but many PAM4 specs are targeting 1E-4 or 1E-5. It uses forward error correction (or other schemes) to get accurate data transmission. 7:50 Companies are designing more complex receivers and more robust computing power to make PAM4 work. This investment is worth it because they don’t have to significantly change their existing hardware. 8:45 PAM is being driven largely by Ethernet. The goal is to get to a 1 Tb/s data rate. 9:15 Currently 400 GbE is the next step towards the 1 Tbps Ethernet rate (terabit per second). 10:25 In Steve’s HP days, the salesmen would e-mail

Learn about parallel computing, the rise of heterogeneous processing (also known as hybrid processing), and the prospect of quantum engineering as a field of study!   Audio link: https://eestalktech.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/heterogeneous-computing-and-quantum-engineering.mp3 00:40 Parallel computing used to be a way of sharing tasks between processor cores. When processor clock rates stopped increasing, the response of the microprocessor companies was to increase the number of cores on a chip to increase throughput. 01:44 But now, the increased use of specialized processing elements has become more popular. A GPU is a good example of this. A GPU is very different from an x86 or ARM processor and is tuned for a different type of processing. GPUs are very good at matrix math and vector math. Originally, they were designed to process pixels. They use a lot of floating point math because the math behind how a pixel  value is computed is very complex. A GPU is very useful if you have a number of identical operations you have to calculate at the same time. 4:00 GPUs used to be external daughter cards, but in the last year or two the GPU manufacturers are starting to release low power parts suitable for embedded applications. They include several traditional cores and a GPU. So, now you can build embedded systems that take advantage of machine learning algorithms that would have traditionally required too much processing power and too much thermal power.   4:50 This is an example of a heterogeneous processor (AMD) or hybrid processor. A heterogeneous processor contains cores of different types, and a software architect figures out which types of workloads are processed by which type of core. Andrew Chen (professor) has predicted that this will increase in popularity because it’s become difficult to take advantage of shrinking the semiconductor feature size. 6:00 This year or next year, we will start to see heterogeneous processors (MOOR) with multiple types of cores. Traditional processors are tuned for algorithms on integer and floating point operations where there isn’t an advantage to doing more than one thing at a time. The dependency chain is very linear. A GPU is good at doing multiple computations at the same time so it can be useful when there aren’t tight dependency chains. Neither processor is very good at doing real-time processing. If you have real time constraints – the latency between an ADC and the “answer” returned by the system must be short – there is a lot of computing required right now. So, a new type of digital hardware is required. Right now, ASICs and FPGAs tend to fill that gap, as we’ve discussed in the All about ASICs podcast. 9:50 Quantum cores (like we discussed in the what is quantum computing podcast) are something that we could see on processor boards at some point. Dedicated quantum computers that can exceed the performance of traditional computers will be introdu

  How will quantum computing change the future of security? What does a quantum computer look like? Mike and Daniel sit down with Lee Barford to get some answers. Video Version: Audio version https://eestalktech.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/cracking-rsa-and-quantum-bits.mp3 Last time we looked at “what is quantum computing” and talked about quantum bits and storing data in superstates. 00:40 Lee talks about how to crack RSA and Shor’s algorithm (wikipedia) 00:50 The history of quantum computing (wiki). The first person to propose it was Richard Feynman in the mid 1960s. There was some interest, but it died out. In the 1990s, Peter Shor published a paper pointing out that if you could build a quantum computer with certain operational properties (machine code instructions), then you could find one factor of a number no matter how long it is. Then, he outlined another number of things he would need, like a quantum Fast Fourier Transform (FFT). Much of the security we use every day is both the RSA public key system and the Diffie Hellman Key Exchange algorithm. HTTPS connections use the Diffie Hellman Key Exchange algorithm. RSA stands for “really secure algorithm” “Rivest, Shamir, and Adelman.” 4:00 RSA only works if the recipients know each other, but Diffie Hellman works for people who don’t know each other but still want to communicate securely. This is useful because it’s not practical for everyone to have their own RSA keys. 5:00 Factoring numbers that are made up of large prime numbers is the basis for RSA. The processing power required for factoring is too large to be practical. People have been working on this for 2500 years. 6:45 Shor’s algorithm is theoretically fast enough to break RSA. If you could build a quantum computer with enough quantum bits and operate with a machine language cycle time that is reasonable (us or ms), then it would be possible to factor thousand bit numbers. 7:50 Famous professors and famous universities have a huge disparity of opinion as to when a quantum computer of that size could be built. Some say 5-10 years, others say up to 50. 8:45 What does a quantum computer look like? It’s easier to describe architecturally than physically. A quantum computer isn’t that much different from a classical computer, it’s simply a co-processor that has to co-exist with current forms of digital electronics. 9:15 If you look at Shor’s algorithm, there are a lot of familiar commands, like “if statements” and “for loops.” But, quantum gates, or quantum assembly language operations, are used in the quantum processor. (more about this) 10:00 Lee thinks that because a quantum gate operates in time instead of space, the term “gate” isn’t a great name. 10:30 What quantum computers exist today? Some have

What is a quantum computer and what is quantum computing? In this week’s episode, Daniel Bogdanoff and Mike Hoffman are joined by quantum computing expert Lee Barford. Video Version (YouTube): Audio Only: https://eestalktech.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/what-is-quantum-computing-15.mp3 0:45 Intro Lee Barford helps to guide Keysight into the quantum computing business + enables the quantum computing experts at Keysight   2:00 The importance of quantum computing Clock rates in all types of digital processors stopped going up in 2006 due to heating limits The processor manufacturers realized the need for more parallelism. Today, Lee helps engineers at Keysight take advantage of this parallelism. Graphics processors can be used as vector and matrix machines Bitcoin utilizes this method.   6:00 The implications of advancements in quantum computing Today, there are parts being made with feature size of the digital transistor that are 10, maybe 7 nanometers (depending on who you believe) So we are heading below 5 nanometers, and there aren’t many unit cells of silicon left at that point. (a unit cell of silicon is 0.5 nanometer) The uncertainty principle comes into play since there are few enough atoms where quantum mechanical effects will disturb the electronics. There are many concerns including a superposition of states (Schrodinger’s cat) and low error tolerance.   10:20 Is Moore’s law going to fail?  Quantum computing is one way of moving the computer industry past this barrier Taking advantage of quantum mechanical effects, engineering with them, to build a new kind of computers that for certain problems, promise to do better than what we currently do.   15:20 Questions for future episodes: What sort of technology goes into a quantum computer? What’s the current state of experimentation? What are some of the motivations for funding quantum computing research? How is Keysight involved in this industry? What problems is quantum computing aiming to solve?   17:30 Using quantum effects to our advantage Quantum computers likely be used in consumer devices because there has to be a very low temperature and/or a vacuum. 18:00 A quantum computer’s fundamental storage unit is a qubit (quantum bit).  A quantum bit (qubit) can be either 1 or 0 with some finite probability 19:00 A quantum register can store multiple qubits, and when read, have a probability of being either of these numbers. A quantum register can store more than one state at a time, but only one value can be read from the quantum register. 21:00 How does one get a useful value out of a quantum reg

Daniel Bogdanoff and Mike Hoffman sit down with Brig Asay to talk about how to price a hardware project. Listen in as they discuss the complexities of pricing a new hardware product in a global economy. Follow Brig Asay on Yelp @baasay. Video Version (YouTube): Audio Only: https://eestalktech.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/how-to-price-your-hardware-project-ees-talk-tech-electrical-engineering-podcast.mp3 0:00 Intro How should you price hardware? 1:45 Tell us in the comments what you think our green screen should be! 2:00 Economics 101: Supply & Demand This is how we generally set prices for hardware 2:40 Top down pricing takes into account your cost of manufacturing. But if you price based on production costs, you’re going to fail in your pricing. It’s all about what consumers are willing to pay. 4:00 Pharmaceutical companies are the example of bad pricing schemes. They justify high prices based on high R&D costs. But the reality is that consumers don’t care about R&D costs. They care about how bad they need the product, and this will determine how much they are willing to pay. 4:30 Someone on EEVblog hacked a 3000T, reverse engineering it to make it a 1 GHz scope.   5:30 The newer the idea, the harder it is to price because there’s no real market value. Talking to potential customers is a good way to start pricing in white space. 6:45 Marketing 101: Who are your customers? Determining who you are trying to sell to and talking with them can help with pricing. Competitor pricing is a good baseline, but then you often get into value-based pricing. 7:50 Spreadsheets are the killer of pricing. They compete with your gut feeling. $10K per GHz of bandwidth is a standard in oscilloscope pricing, but it doesn’t always apply. When we came out with the Infiniium Z-Series, a 63 GHz scope, we knew the market couldn’t support a $630K price. 9:00 Price/volume curve = Supply and demand chart 10:50 Different regions have different pricing expectations. Currency, cultural expectations, and import taxes all come into play when considering regional pricing. Should a small company even worry about regional pricing? 16:40 You need to be willing to adjust pricing. Dynamics of the market and the value of your product can change over time. If you’re not selling anything, you need to adjust your price. Priced too low and people may have the perception that you’re selling a low-quality product. 19:20 Pricing too low may also inadvertently shrink your

  We talk to ASIC Planner Mike Beyers about what it takes to design the world’s fastest ADC in today’s electrical engineering podcast. Video Version (YouTube):   Audio Only: https://eestalktech.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/the-worlds-fastest-adc.mp3 Intro: Mike is an ASIC planner on the ASIC Design Team. Prestudy, learn about making an ASIC. 00:30 What is an ADC? An ADC is an analog to digital converter, it takes analog data inputs and provides digital data outputs. What’s the difference between analog and digital ASICs? 1:00 There are three types of ASICs: 1.Signal conditioning ASICs 2. Between 1 and 3 is a converter, either digital to analog (DAC) or analog to digital (ADC) 3. Signal processing ASICs, also known as digital ASICs 1:50 Signal conditioning ASICs can be very simple or very complicated e.g. Stripline filters are simple, front end of an oscilloscope can be complicated 2:45 There’s a distinction between a converter vs. an analog chip with some digital functionality A converter has both digital and analog. But there are some analog chips with a digital interface, like an I2C or SPI interface. 4:25 How do you get what’s happening into the analog world onto a digital interface, and how fast can you do it? 4:35 Mike Hoffman designed a basic ADC design in school using a chain of operational amplifiers (opamps) A ladder converter, or “thermometer code” is the most basic of ADC designs 6:00 A slow ADC can use single ended CMOS, a faster ADC might use parallel LVDS, now it’s almost always SERDES for highest performance chips 6:35 The world’s fastest ADC? 6:55 Why do we design ADCs? We usually don’t make what we can buy off the shelf. The Nyquist rate determines the necessary sample rate, for example, a 10 GHz signal needs to be sampled at 20 – 25 Gigasamples per second 1/25 GHz = 40 ps 8:45 ADC Vertical resolution, or the number of bits. So, ADCs generally have two main specs, speed (sample rate) and vertical resolution. 9:00 The ability to measure time very accurately is often most important, but people often miss the noise side of things. 9:45 It’s easy to oversimplify into just two specs. But, there’s more that hast to be considered. Specifications like bandwidth, frequency flatness, noise, and SFDR 10:20 It’s much easier to add bits to an ADC design than it is to decrease the ADCs noise. 10:42 Noise floor, SFDR, and SNR measure how good an analog to digital converter is. SFDR means “spurious free dynamic range” and

Laser-delivered Netflix and backyard data centers! The conversation continues with optical communications guru, Stefan Loeffler. In this episode, Daniel Bogdanoff and Mike Hoffman discuss optical infrastructure today and what the future holds for optics. Video version (YouTube):   Audio Version: https://eestalktech.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/how-internet-is-delivered-data-centers-and-infrastructure.mp3 Discussion Overview: Optical Communication Infrastructure 00:30 Optics = Laser-driven Netflix delivery system Client-side vs line-side 1:00 Line-side is the network that transports the signals from the supplier to the consumer Client-side is the equipment that is either a consumer or business, accepting the data from the network provider.   Yellow cables in your wall indicate presence of fiber 1:40 Technically, optics is communication using radiation! But it is invisible to us as humans. 2:20   Getting fiber all the way to the antenna is one of the major new technologies 2:30 But this requires you to have power at the antenna 2:45 However, typically there is a “hotel” or  base station at the bottom of the antenna where the power is and where fiber traditionally connects, instead of up to the antenna Really new or experimental antennas have fiber running all the way up the pole  3:28   Network topologies- star, ring, and mesh 3:42 Base stations are usually organized in star-form, or a star network pattern. A star network starts at a single base station and distributes data to multiple cells Rings (ring networks) are popular in metro infrastructure because you can encircle an entire area 4:20 Optical rings are like traffic circles for data. Is ring topology the most efficient or flexible? 6:20 An advantage of ring and mesh topologies is built-in resilience Mesh topologies have more bandwidth but require more fiber optic cable 7:10 How often is the topology or format of a network defined by geography or regulations? 8:30   How consumers get fiber 9:20 Business or academic campuses typically utilize mesh networks on the client side, subscribing to a fiber provider Fiber itself or a certain bandwidth using that fiber can be leased If you’re a business, like a financial institution, and latency or bandwidth is critical, leasing fiber is necessary so you have control over the network 9:45   What’s the limiting factor of optical?  What are the limitations of the hardware that’s sending/receiving optical signals? 11:08 Whatever we do in fiber, at some point, it is electrical 11:27 There will be a tipping point where quantum computing and photon-computing (

Mike Hoffman and Daniel Bogdanoff continue their discussion with Stefan Loeffler about optical communication. In the first episode, we looked at “what is optical communication?” and “how does optical communication work?” This week we dig deeper into some of the latest optical communication techniques and advances in the industry as well as the use of fiber optic cable in electronics and long-range telecommunication networks. Video version (YouTube):   Audio Version: https://eestalktech.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/copper-vs-fiber-optic-cable-and-optical-communication-techniques-ees-talk-tech-11.mp3   Discussion Overview:   Installation of optical fiber and maintenance of optical fiber We can use optical communication techniques such as phase multiplexing There’s a race between using more colors and higher bitrates to increase data communication rates. Indium doped fiber amplifiers can multiply multiple channels at different colors on the same optical PHY. You can use up to 80 colors on a single fiber optic channel! 3:52 How is optical communication similar to RF? Optical communication is a lot like WiFi 4:07 Light color in optical fiber is the equivalent of carrier frequencies in RF   How do we increase the data rate in optical fiber? There are many multiplexing methods such as multicore, wavelength division, and polarization 4:50 Practically, only two polarization modes can be used at once. The limiting factor is the separation technology on the receiver side. 6:20 But, this still doubles our bandwidth! What about dark fiber? Dark fiber is the physical piece of optical fiber that is unused. 7:07 Using dark fiber on an existing optical fiber is the first step to increasing fiber optic bandwidth. But wavelengths can also be added. Optical C-band vs L-band 7:48 Optical C-band was the first long-distance band. It is now joined by the L-band. Is there a difference between using different colors and different wavelengths? Optical fibers are a light show for mosquitos! 8:30   How do we fix optical fibers? 10:36 For short distances, an OTDR or visual light fault detectors are often used by sending red light into a fiber and lights up when there’s a break in the fiber   Are there other ways to extend the amount of data we can push through a fiber? 11:35 Pulses per second can be increased, but we will eventually bleed into neighboring channels Phase modulation is also used PAM-4 comes into play with coding (putting multiple bits in a symbol) And QAM which relies on both amplitude and phase modulation PAM-4 test solutions How do we visualize optical fibers?  14:05 We ca

The future will be built using ASICs! Daniel Bogdanoff and Mike Hoffman sit down with chip sage and planner Mike Beyers to discuss the challenges of building custom application specific integrated circuits. This podcast was inspired by the blog post “Creating an ASIC – Our Quest to Make the Best Cheap Oscilloscope” Video version (YouTube):   Audio version: https://eestalktech.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/all-about-asics.mp3 Discussion Overview: We’re finally a real podcast now! What is an ASIC? An ASIC is an application specific integrated circuit, an IC designed for a specific task. Why do we use ASICs? ASIC architecture 101 2:46 The main specification people talk about is the size smallest thing you can find on a chip – like the gate of a CMOS transistor Effective gate length is shorter than the gate length drawn because of the manufacturing  process. Another key spec is how many transistors you can fit in a square mm Metal layers for interconnects are also more important, but can cause the mask sets to be more expensive Do we care more about a gate’s footprint or its depth? 4:11 Will Moore’s Law hit a ceiling? 4:29 What about using three dimensional structures? 5:37 Is Moore’s Law just a marketing number? 5:51 Does technology ever slow down? 6:29 Power is often the largest limiter 6:58 Google builds data centers next to hydroelectric dams 7:34 Battery power 7:43 Power drives cost 7:53 How does the power problem affect ASICs? 8:25 There are power integrity and thermal management concerns Dedicated routes on an ASIC vs switching on an FPGA 8:14 Who actually uses ASICs? 10:14 IOT technology – 7 nm and 14nm chips A lot of people are using older technology because it’s much more affordable (like 45 nm) ASICs on your bike could be a thing? 11:16 SRAM wireless electronic bike shifters 11:57 Is bike hacking a real thing? Yes! Encrypted wireless communication helps prevent it. Is an opamp (operational amplifier) an ASIC? What to consider when investing in an ASIC 13:23 What’s the next best alternative to building this ASIC? With an ASIC, you can often drive lower cost, but you also increase performance and  reliability Is there a

Optical communication 101 – learn about the basics of optics! Daniel Bogdanoff and Mike Hoffman interview Stefan Loeffler. Video Version (YouTube): Audio version: https://eestalktech.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/optical-101-9.mp3 Discussion overview: Similarities between optical and electrical Stefan was at OFC What is optics? 1:21 What is optical communication? 1:30 There’s a sender and a receiver (optical telecommunication) Usually we use a 9 um fiber optic cable, but sometimes we use lasers and air as a medium The transmitter is typically a laser LEDs don’t work for optical Optical fiber alignment is challenging, and is often accomplished using robotics How is optical different from electrical engineering? Photodiodes act receivers, use a transimpedance amplifier. It is essentially “electrical in, electrical out” with optical in the middle. Optical used to be binary, but now it’s QAM 64 Why do we have optical communication? A need for long distance communication led to the use of optical. Communication lines used to follow train tracks, and there were huts every 80 km. So, signals could be regenerated every 80 km. In the 1990s, a new optical amplifier was introduced. Optical amplifier test solutions Signal reamplifcation vs. signal regeneration There’s a .1 dB per km loss in modern fiber optic cable 11:20 This enables undersea fiber optic communication, which has to be very reliable How does undersea communication get implemented? Usually by consortium: I-ME-WE SEA-ME-WE AT&T was originally a network provider What is dark fiber (also known as dark fibre)? Fiber is cheap, installation and right-of-way is expensive What happens if fiber breaks? Dark fiber can be used as a sensor by observing the change in its refractive index Water in fiber optic line is bad, anchors often break fiber optic cable 17:30 Fiber optic cable can be made out of a lot of different things Undersea fiber has to have some extra slack in the cable Submarines are often used to inspect fiber optic cable You can find breaks in the line using OTDR – “Optical time domain reflectometry” A “distributed reflection” means a mostly linear loss. The slope of the reflection tells you the loss rate. The refractive index in fiber optic cable is about 1.5 Latency and delay 23:00 The main issue is the data processing, not the data transmission A lot of optical engineers started in RF engineering

Learn more about producer risk and consumer risk! Mike Hoffman, Daniel Bogdanoff, and Matthew Woerner discuss various aspects of the risk involved in manufacturing and buying goods. Audio player: https://eestalktech.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/producer-and-consumer-risk-ees-talk-tech-8-keysight-technologies.mp3   More about calibration: http://www.keysight.com/find/americas_cal Discussion Overview: What is consumer risk and producer risk? There’s always risk, so how do you manage it? What should consumers do to be safe? How are producers testing their products before selling them? The history of the ballpoint pen is a good object lesson for producers @7:00 Are lifetime warranties just a marketing ploy? Lifetime warranty transfers consumer risk into producer risk As a producer how do you decide how long your warranty should be? How to build reliability models for products 10:30 How can we predict a failure rate for a product? We have use temperature chamber and other test techniques. How do you balance AFR (annualized failure rate) with the risk of experiencing catastrophic failure ? What is a false accept? What is the “escape rate,” what is a false pass ? A false accept is the term for test results that should have failed, but instead pass. How do you avoid catastrophic issues in production? 15:15 How accurate can you really be? How accurately can you measure something that takes time? Is there a guide for the uncertainty of measurements? Traceability is important for making reliable measurements Fill up your gas tank early in the morning and you get more gas What should you do now? 20:00 What is margin stackup? Everything in a device has margin, so margin stackup is the combination of all uncertainties. Calibration is a very wide industry, it doesn’t just apply to test and measurement! Think, car alignments, etc. What is Matthew’s biggest challenge? 24:23 How do you make sure your measurements are accurate? Predictions 28:00 Some companies test products based on the region that product is being sold into, as different regions can have different quality expectations.

How do we handle the ethical dilemmas that arise when building increasingly capable and intelligent systems? AI is all around us- likely a part of your phone, home systems, and even cars. Autonomous cars offer greater convenience, safety, and efficiency, but is the world ready to tackle the corresponding ethical dilemmas? https://eestalktech.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/ai-ethics-and-autonomous-cars.mp3 Video (YouTube): Follow Brig Asay on Yelp @baasay. Discussion Overview: AI Ethics Restaurant Reviews by AI 01:41 Self-driving (autonomous) cars AI ethical dilemma and AI decision liability What about consumer liability? AI decision-making without human interaction 07:25 The three stages of AI Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI also known as “weak AI”), Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI)  07:48 AI consciousness, AI ethical standards, and self-replicating AI Humanoid robots Should AI be allowed to replicate itself? 10:16 Task-based AI using computers Is there a need to program AI to have morals and ethics? The prisoner’s dilemma and game theory Challenges of marketing self-driving cars Autonomous buses emulating human behavior Should AI have to follow local laws and regulations? 17:50 Telemetry tracking autonomous vehicles for speed monitoring Self-programmable FPGAs and neural network simulations Can a computer be evil? 26:30 EEs Talk Tech Electrical Engineering podcast

Do you know how the volt was discovered? It might surprise you! Daniel Bogdanoff, Mike Hoffman, and Matthew Woerner discuss the volt’s wild history and more in this week’s EEs Talk Tech podcast. https://eestalktech.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/06-frog-legs-helped-discover-the-volt.mp3 Video (YouTube): Discussions Overview: The volt and building batteries Volta discovered the Volt (article) Capital vs. Lower case SI units The Greeks knew about static electricity It’s not that hard to build a basic battery How do potato batteries work? 4:30, 10:30 How do lemon batteries work? The invention of electrostatic generators and storage in Leiden jars Who were Galvani and Volta? Galvani started experimenting with static electricity Mike simply assumes frog legs are delicious Galvani was skinning a frog leg for some experiments and the frog leg kicked! Why and how did the leg kick? Galvani vs. Volta Galvani believed in “animal electricity,” but Volta thought it was just electricity Galvani is considered to be the father of bioelectromagnetics Mike thinks plants crave electrolytes Redox reactions make biobatteries work (like frog leg batteries and ox head batteries) Galvani’s nephew performed demonstrations on more than just animal tissue Mary Shelley and the fabled origin of Frankenstein Volta and the invention of the Voltaic Stack (or Voltaic Pile) The first light bulb was demonstrated for the Royal Society in London What is the volt now? Mike was born just in time to browse dank memes Why is it called “natural philosophy” – Because there was much study of the mind (Greeks), and technology finally allowed natural philosophers to study nature. Wikipedia tip Back in the day, scientists had to understand a lot of different disciplines Famous scientific rivalries over time – is Edison vs. Tesla over hyped? Predictions: Maker movement We want EEs Talk Tech fan fiction. We forgot Mike’s prediction 23:25 EEs Talk Tech is an electrical engineering podcast by Keysight Technologies

The entire universe can be described using just seven different units! These are the metre, kilogram, second, ampere, kelvin, mole, and candela and are defined by the The International System of Units (SI) as the seven base units through which all other units can be derived. Learn more about these standard units, their interesting history, and relevance today. Daniel Bogdanoff, Mike Hoffman, and Matthew Woerner discuss. https://eestalktech.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/the-7-ways-we-describe-the-universe-si-units.mp3 Video (YouTube): Discussion Overview: What is Metrology? Meteorology vs Metrology What are SI Units and what is the international system of units? Why do we even have SI units? The history of the yard, where does the word “ruler” come from? The specific value of the kilogram (kg) Basics of the kilogram and how we define mass 07:00 The kilogram has sister units. Units of measure defined by constants in the universe are helpful because they don’t change. What makes up a second? (Uses a cesium atom‘s vibrations) What are base SI units? 12:06 What are derived SI units? Derived SI units are units of measurement that can be found by selectively combining the seven base SI units. For example, the volt. What is the difference between base and derived SI units? Electrical current, the Ampere, and Electromagnetics 15:00 What is the triple point of a substance? It is the temperature and pressure at which a substance’s gas, liquid, and solid states coexist What are moles (chemistry) – the quantity of a substance 20:20 What is a candela? (Luminous intensity) Planck’s constant is important! How to use Planck’s equation The Watt balance is replacing the physical versions of the kilogram 26:16 Mike’s amazing water bottle flip 38:53 EEs Talk Tech is an electrical engineering podcast from Keysight Technologies