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Do work related projects count? I don't do as many home projects lately.
Ron
You guys probably know that I am now retired. Back in the mid-70s, I worked for Consolidated Video Systems in Mountain View, CA . We **broken link removed** for video tape recorders. I had been hired to do A/D and D/A converter design, along with other miscellaneous analog circuit design tasks.
My crowning achievement was the ADC for the CVS 520. It was a 9 bit ADC, sampling at 14.3 megasamples/sec. It was autoaligning, for the most part. It only had 6 pots, and the alignment techs loved it.
You might say that's a lot of parts for an A/D. You can buy a comparable one today on a chip for a few bucks. When I designed this, there was a total of one A/D IC available. It was made by TRW, was in a 64 pin DIP, cost $600 (!), dissipated 7 watts, and required that you epoxy a heat sink on it and blow forced air over it. My board was considerably bigger, and probably drew more power, but it was only $180 out the door, including testing and alignment. It had no exotic parts in it. Differential gain and phase were outstanding, and, due to the autoalignment, it didn't drift out of alignment.
I bought this used CVS 520 on Ebay in a fit of nostalgia several years ago for about $100. They had sold for $15k originally.
Oh, I should mention: No simulation, and all schematics were drawn by hand, on a drafting table.
Thanks for the kind words. I also designed the sync tip clamp and the PLL in the 520.Ron -
I just lifted the Sync Tip Clamp from a copy of the 520 service manual, breadboarded it and it worked fine - input offset was 3mV. This will be used in an alternator current-meter I am building. The clamp attacks amplitude increases within one 100Hz cycle or about 10msec and releases in 300msec.
I also used the frequency-locked loop from either the 520 or 504 in the F-14 Heads-Up Display for the Navy version of the fighter. This design was accepted and used in the display although the engineers at Kaiser Aerospace never understood it, and in fact there was controversy with some engineers in favor of the 520 design and some against.
I remember that the 520 was awarded an Emmy by the broadcasting industry - this machine stood alone. I frequently refer to the analog circuits in the 520 as the best I can get. It is worthy of a book on advanced analog circuit design.
Mission cat