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Linear Technology Magazine • February 1996
EDITOR'S PAGE
On Breadboarding
New integrated circuits don’t come
easy these days. Marketeers would
have you build a new Pentium
®
Pro
class microprocessor in a few months.
Never mind the half-million transis-
tors that all have to work correctly for
the product to come out right the first
time.
Simulation may be the way to go
when faced with one-half million tran-
sistors and a year’s time to market,
but what about in the analog world
where LTC excels? No analog product
in this or perhaps even the next cen-
tury will have one-tenth the transistor
count of a microprocessor. The semi-
conductor world has come to rely
heavily on simulations; and, in fact,
we at LTC do our share of simula-
tions; but, as the photo shows, we
also do our share of breadboarding.
It may be that the mere mention of
breadboarding shows my age. What
could be simpler than building a cir-
cuit from discrete transistors, diodes,
resistors, chewing gum and piano
wire? Once built, the circuit can be
tested node by node, and after the
design is proven to work over its
required electrical and environmen-
tal parameters, it can be put into
production.
In the IC design world, the simula-
tion is king because breadboarding is
hard. Transistors don’t come out of a
catalog; instead they are “kit parts”—
the types of transistors that can be
made on a particular wafer-fab pro-
cess. All capacitors must be small
values, since only these are supported
by the IC process; and so forth and so
on. The implementation is not easy,
but the reward justifies the labors.
What is the reward?
The reward is an IC that works the
first time—or at least the second time.
Breadboarding makes you look at the
circuit from a system point of view.
Can it be integrated into the system in
which it is intended to work? Are all
the hooks there? Breadboarding is
not always an option because of the
increased complexity of today’s ICs,
but we try to use it whenever we can
to complement simulation. Bread-
boarding helps us get it right “the first
time.”
This issue of Linear Technology
begins our sixth year of publication.
We have expanded our publishing
schedule to four times per year. We
continue to ask for feedback from our
readership. Call, FAX or write to us at
the numbers on the back page.
by Richard Markell
Figure 1. Breadboard of upcoming LTC microprocessor product?
continued on page 22
LTC in the News...
The only company in the history of
Silicon Valley to achieve continuous
sales growth over 40 consecutive
quarters is Linear Technology Corp.
In January, LTC announced record
second-quarter net sales of more than
$96 million, an increase of 55% over
the same quarter of 1995.
“This solid 10-year record vali-
dates both the strength of our market
and the effectiveness of our strategy
to be a broad-based supplier of high
performance analog circuits,” said
Robert Swanson, president and CEO.
“We attained record levels of sales
and profits and generated an addi-
tional $20 million in cash,” he said.
Shortly before LTC ended its sec-
ond fiscal quarter, Forbes magazine
again listed the company on its “Honor
Roll” of “The Best Small Companies
in America.” It was the sixth year in
a row in which Linear Technology
was included among “only a handful
of companies (that) have what it takes
to be a long-term repeater on our 200
Best Small Companies in America
list.” The magazine made special
mention of LTC and observed that a
$10,000 investment in Linear six
years ago would be worth about
$170,000 today.
“All chip companies are not cre-
ated equal,” said the influential Cabot
Market Letter for investors in its De-
cember 1, 1995, issue. “Linear
Technology is ... the leader in its
market. (The company’s) chips don’t
deal with data. They interact with the
real world to monitor, amplify or
transform continuous analog signals
associated with real-world phenom-
ena like temperature, pressure,
weight, position, height, speed or
sound.
“That’s diversity in the extreme.
In fact, LTC markets over 4,700
different products to over 9,000
manufacturers worldwide. Industrial
applications use 40% of the firm’s
output, computers 30%, telecom-
munications 15%, military 10% and
other 5%. International sales ac-
count for about half of the total.”
Pentium is a registered trademark of Intel Corporation.