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The Cool parts thread

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Mikebits

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I thought I would start this thread to share cool part discoveries. Have you come across a really cool IC or other part, share it here. I will start with.

First on my list of cool parts are these Darn fast logic gates. Would you believe 13GHz clock speeds?
Products - Hittite Microwave Corporation

Next on the menu is a nice selection of ORing controller chip thus enabling shared power buses replacing heat dissipating power diodes.

**broken link removed**

Lastly to light up your dining experience is a simple high powered LED driver. The BCR-450

Infineon Technologies
https://www.infineon.com/dgdl/bcr45...70181&fileId=db3a304314dca38901156008609e1dc9
 
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I thought I would start this thread to share cool part discoveries. Have you come across a really cool IC or other part, share it here. I will start with.

First on my list of cool parts are these Darn fast logic gates. Would you believe 13GHz clock speeds?
Products - Hittite Microwave Corporation
Good luck soldering it.

Also how are you going to make stipline PCBs with a characteristic impedance of 50Ω?
 
How would you go about soldering a part with not legs, just pads?
 
For a QFN like the link posted originally, our techs do it by hand with a hot air rework tool. They tin the pads beforehand and use lots of liquid rosin or paste flux. It is not the easiest thing for them to do, but the board I am designing now at work has four or five of them on it (QFN or DFN), and the tech's might complain but it will still be done in house. BGA's are much harder, we have to send those out to have them attached. We could try and do BGA's in house but the difficulty is in verifying they are done correctly, we don't have the tools to do that part of it.
 
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My contribution: Auto-power saving LDO regulator for battery powered apps. The error amplifier inside basically has two speeds, slow and fast. Slow is utilized during standby current time (<300uA output) and reduces quiescent current to below 2uA for the regulator while sacrificing some performance in load/line response. Once you go above 1mA output current it kicks into high speed mode for improved performance, drawing about 10x the quiescent current (~20uA). Great little thing for battery powered devices that sit in standby most of the time and 'wake up' occasionally to do some real work. I use it in a system that has to run a RTCC on the main microcontroller while it's in a sleep mode, and it wakes up occasionally to do some data acquisition where I then care about regulation (A/D stuff).

**broken link removed**
 
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A 2500V 1200A cont. (2400A Peak) IGBT:
**broken link removed**

Not very practical for most people due to the price, but it is definitly cool. Worked great for my off-line tesla coil.
 
For leadless parts I use my cheap DealExtreme soldering paste and my cheap Chinese hot air station. It works real well and I'm pleased with it. No stencils, I just spread the paste as cleanly as I can, drop the chip on and give it some hot air until it settles down. Pic attached. In the pic, I just did the two chips, one QFN and the other is some odd package name.

I thought this part was pretty cool. I tiny PIR sensor.
Digi-Key - 269-4710-ND (Zilog - ZEPIR0AAS01SBCG)
 

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Good luck soldering it.

Also how are you going to make stipline PCBs with a characteristic impedance of 50Ω?

I would think you could get by using microstrip.
 
Real cool(ing) stuff

Micropelt has developed a Peltier cooling element to be used directly on SMD chips.

I downloaded the datasheet, but there are some details missing (like pinout).

Will hopefully receive that info to make Eagle devices.

For the time being you might study the available datasheet for D403 and D404.

Boncuk
 

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The devices are really small at 1mm x 2mm! It looks like it is designed so that you bond your chip die ontop of theirs. How are you at wire bonding? :D
 
Thanks. Been busy rooting around for my next gig.

Here's another cool part - this is a 5V "postage stamp" switching regulator that works above AND below 5V -
https://www.electro-tech-online.com/custompdfs/2009/08/ldo03c_1191527491.pdf

So if you have a project working on 6V, it will regulate down, then up, as the battery voltage drops. This is always a pain with 6V because even a low drop-out regulator won't work when the batteries go below 5V, and four AA or AAA batteries still have some 80% of their power left at the 1.25V mark. With this you can run them flat.

Edit: No it doesn't. The spec sheet is a lie. Just got some in and checked them, they are common buck regulators, same as the rest, sorry about this.
 
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The devices are really small at 1mm x 2mm! It looks like it is designed so that you bond your chip die ontop of theirs. How are you at wire bonding? :D

This is the reply I received from Micropelt today:

Micropelt said:
Dear Hans,

Micropelt thin-film thermoelectric coolers are supplied and handled as "chip"
component.
That looks somehow similar to chip (SMD) components, like inductors, resistors, NTC's or photonic components like LED's or laser diodes.

Our customers do assembly our TECs in their package of choice (like TO-46,
TO-39, TO-56, TOSA or any other common in photonics or sensor markets) via their assembly lines with standard wire-bonding.

Micropelt TECs cannot be soldered via standard solder equipment, like any
engineer is having is his lab to solder passive and active components on his
PCB.

The mentioned leads in the datasheet are the '+' and the '-' of the TEC. A TEC is current controlled, and can in principle be controlled with current in both directions. The direction of the current determines which side will get "cold" and "hot".

Does this answer your question ?

Best regards,

Wladimir Punt

I have no idea about wire bonding.
 
I have done manual wire bonding using a K&S machine directly to wafers. It's a pain in the rear. I was using 1 mil aluminum wire. After days of training on the machine I was barely able to make a connection. IIRC the machine used an ultrasonic welding method.
 
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