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Three years ago, I bought an Asus laptop, specifically the Zenbook Pro 17. It's a powerful machine and works just fine for my needs, but it had one problem that made me want to either return it or throw it out the window. I would work on projects for hours on end and close the lid when I was done. I haven't manually shut down a computer in more than 10 years. I only do so after a forced update or during a debugging session. So I would close the lid, and a couple of hours later I would open it back up. Instead of waking from sleep, the computer would start from scratch as if it had been turned off and the battery was nearly dead. That meant everything I had open was closed. I'm lucky that most of the applications I run can restore a previous session, but it was extremely annoying. I had a similar issue with my previous Asus, and I had blamed Windows for it. The computer often woke from sleep just so Microsoft could perform an update, which used up all my battery. Sometimes I would open my backpack to find a dead laptop that was warm to the touch. I've written this blog post at least five times. Each time I thought I had solved the issue, but then it came back. This time, though, I think I have finally resolved it. So if you have an Asus laptop running Windows and you experience this very annoying issue, you are not alone. In my case, the culprit was the Wi-Fi adapter, specifically the MediaTek Wi-Fi 6E MT7922. The Solution On Windows: Open Device Manager. Expand Network adapters. Right-click the MediaTek device and click Properties. Click the Advanced tab. In the Property box, select Power Saving. In the Value field, select Disabled. That's it. After three years of annoying restarts, this finally solved my problem. Now let me explain what was going on. What Was Happening (based on Windows Event Viewer) When the laptop lid is closed, Windows initiates "Modern Standby." In this state, the screen turns off to save power, but the system remains partially active to maintain background network connectivity. Shortly after, Windows attempts to transition into a deeper low-power state and disconnects the network adapter to conserve battery. However, the MediaTek Wi-Fi driver (mtkwlex) fails to handle this low-power transition properly. About a minute later, it generates Event ID 1033 errors referencing a network device path (specifically \Device\NDMP3 in my logs). Because the driver's error message resource is missing or corrupted, Windows Event Viewer cannot interpret the error and displays a generic warning instead: "The description for Event ID 1033 from source mtkwlex cannot be found. Either the component that raises this event is not installed on your local computer or the installation is corrupted..." Because the Wi-Fi driver fails to sleep, it keeps the system partially awake. This causes abnormal background battery drain and heat buildup, which is exacerbated when the laptop is in an enclosed space like a bag. In response to this abnormal drain, Windows triggers Event 507: "Austerity Battery Drain Budget Exceeded." It's important to note that this event is Windows intentionally waking the laptop up to prevent the battery from dying completely. However, because the Wi-Fi driver is already in a crashed or unstable kernel state, the system fails to recover from this forced wake-up. The result is a silent system crash or thermal shutdown, followed by Event 12 ("The operating system started"), which confirms the laptop rebooted. The Result With the fix in place, the Wi-Fi device no longer attempts to enter its power-saving sleep mode, so it never crashes. The ultimate solution would be a fixed MT7922 driver, but try as I might, I haven't been able to find one online. It's been three weeks so far, and I've been able to resume my work without coming back to a crashed computer. I hope this helps someone else.
It's easier for someone in my position, after working 20 years in this field to talk about morals. I can disagree with the choices my employer makes. In fact, I can walk away. But I remember the dilemma I felt I was in, earlier in my career. The lead developer stood behind me while I was working on a feature and asked me to make a div clickable. That's it. Technically, it's the simplest thing you can do. But, I hesitated. He watched from behind as I tabbed through every application on my computer, doing everything but what he asked. "Just make it clickable," he said again. I have made divs clickable a thousand times in my then short career, I knew that html standards were merely a suggestion. But this one rubbed me the wrong way. Instead I said, "I already have an anchor tag below, the div doesn't need to be clickable." "The fuck you're talking about? Just do it." We got into an argument, and I ended up doing exactly what he said. A little after I pushed my code, he revisited my code and added a slight delay to my click event using setTimeout to disconnect the user action to what occurred after. If what I'm saying sounds a bit vague, that's how it was framed at a time. We had disconnected the technical ask, clickable div, from the actual feature to make the whitespace on the page clickable. Let me make it even clearer. Have you ever used a coupon website? You buy something on a website, let's say nike.com. When you get to the checkout cart, they have a little box that says "enter coupon code for a discount". So you scour the web to find a coupon that will help you pay less for your purchase. You land on our website where we offer a dozen coupons, but they are all partially hidden. The section says "click to reveal". When you click, some random popup appears, then the code is revealed for you to copy and paste and you go on your merry way with a discount. Everything sounds fine so far. What you don't know is that the coupon website gets credit for the sale. A portion of the price you paid goes straight into our pocket, whether you got a discount or not. We get credit from the referral, that's how affiliate marketing works. So why is making the div clickable, or the whitespace clickable a big deal? Because it captures accidental clicks. The company doesn't care if they help you find a good discount or not. In fact, they don't even care if the code works. They just want you to click and for that popup to open so they can get the credit. My task was framed as a technical request, instead of outright saying "trick the user into clicking." When the Honey scandal surfaced, I was confused why it was news anyway. Deception in affiliate marketing is a standard. Very often we disconnect our work from the real world consequences. Back in 2019 I met this girl at a friend’s birthday party. She worked at a bank in the software development sector, and told me about the project on which she’d been working. Their system collected data from various sources on people applying for financial services (e.g.: loans) and would indicate if someone was eligible, or raise a red flag. In the latter case they would have to deal with substantial additional bureaucracy, and often times would not be able to access these services anyway. She seemed quite proud of her work, and told me her team had demoed it the previous week in front of the whole office. They’d shown the report that the system generated for each person in the team. In her case, the system flagged her as “dangerous”, and she was not eligible for a loan. Her grandmother was from Iran, and because there’s frequently cases of money laundering or other irregularities in Iran, she’s immediately flagged too. Despite her being a Dutch citizen, born and raised in the Netherlands, and working in this Dutch financial institution, her bloodline was “too risky” for her employer to lend her money.1 I was confused, and honestly, heartbroken. This person was telling me how proud they were of their work, building a system that discriminates them based on their bloodline. I questioned what she thought about it, and she explained “well, the rules are there…” —she paused a few times— “the rules are there…”. I remained silent and she eventually finished her sentence after repeating it a few times “the rules are there to protect us”. Even though this was six years ago, every time I remember this situation it brings me great sadness. Here was a person who’d worked hard to build a system which would discriminate against them, and yet stood proudly defending their work. We don't see it as our responsibility to question the system. We are happy to do the work as long as we don't see the immediate consequences. I feel this whenever I see flock cameras mounted in the street. Someone had to design them, write the code, test them, ensure that they work to spec. Someone had to install them. These are people doing a good technical job, yet I'm sure they wouldn't be happy if they were tracked by the very system. This is why I was mad when Anthropic wrote their manifesto saying they are against tracking citizens, as opposed to non citizens. You don't get one without the other. We track everyone then discriminate later. This is why I'm against age verification systems, no matter how technically impressive the solution is. Because in the end, I'm the one who has to upload my ID to a system that I cannot trust. With AI, it's even easier to disconnect your day to day work from its consequences. I understand it's much easier to ignore these things when you are just getting started in your career, but eventually, you have to voice your opinion.
During the pandemic, we completed one of our largest projects at work. To celebrate, since we couldn't meet in person, we all ordered food on DoorDash and played an online escape room game together. We were on a Zoom call, helping each other out and having fun. The first challenge was to escape a jail cell. To escape, each of us had to find clues in our own cell to figure out how to open the doors. We each had to find an object that solved a piece of the puzzle, and once we put them all together, the door would open. As a first challenge, it was easy enough. Everyone found a brightly colored object in their room and described it to the team so we could piece it together. Everyone but one team member. "Come on, read it, man, we can win this." He froze. Someone jumped in to help: "Mine was the most obvious green object in the room. Just look for something bright. Maybe blue, or orange, something that seems out of place." He didn't respond. He just sat there, frozen on camera. We figured he was having internet connectivity issues. We waited a good five minutes before he finally found it, and we moved on to the next level. I didn't think much of that day. We finished the game, we had fun, it was great. He waited until our next one-on-one to explain what had actually happened. He panicked, and he was embarrassed. It turned out he was colorblind. We were yelling random color names at him, and he couldn't, for the life of him, see any of them. As far as I can tell, I'm not colorblind, and it never would have occurred to me that this was something to account for. Just last week, I learned about Vehicle Motion Cues on the iPhone, a feature that helps reduce motion sickness. I don't think I've ever experienced motion sickness myself, or at least never in a car. Watching a blind person navigate a website was eye-opening for me. I realized that many of my past design choices would have worked against their experience without my ever knowing it. The same goes for someone navigating a computer entirely by voice. I recently rediscovered Windows Speech Recognition, which I found pretty annoying for my own needs. But for someone who relies on it for all of their computer use, it's an essential tool. A coworker once mentioned, almost in passing, that she struggles to read certain fonts because of dyslexia. Tight letter spacing and low-contrast text make some of our internal tools nearly unreadable to her. I had picked those fonts because they looked good on a demo slide. It had never crossed my mind that a font choice could be the difference between someone reading a document easily and someone giving up on it entirely. In some of our zoom calls, a teammate would often ask if he could do audio only before the call. While it didn't bother me at all, the managers kept insisting on everyone turning on their cameras. But after he used the camera for a few minutes, his connection would start dropping. I just assumed he had slow Internet. But the reality was he was located in a rural area and he relied entirely on his phone's hotspot to connect to the internet. The zoom call was using up all his data in minutes. None of these problems were problems for me. That's exactly what made them invisible. Unless you are experiencing these issues, there's little reason to ever notice them. We tend to design our tools, our meetings, and our expectations around our own experience of the world, and then mistake that experience for the default. It takes a colorblind teammate freezing on a call, or a friend who can't ride in the passenger seat without getting sick, to remind us that "normal" was only ever normal for us. You can never anticipate every invisible problem in advance, that's impossible. But at the very least, we should remember that our own experience is rarely the default. We should be a bit more curious on how others experience the tools we build.
Amazon has been accused several times for ripping off merchants on its platform. And every single time they denied any wrongdoing. A merchant, or anyone really, can create a product (or source it from China), then resell it on amazon. Amazon is the service provider, and hosts all the metrics concerning the products. If Amazon themselves were in the business of creating and selling products, then that creates a potential of conflict of interest. Because they have the data of all products that sell and sell well. They could replicate that success without doing any further research since the merchant has already confirmed the existence of demand. It's not surprising that Amazon Basics quickly became the best selling "private-label brand" on Amazon. They already know what sells because they have access to the data. Yet they continued to deny it, and state that they only ever use publicly available data from sellers. An Amazon spokesperson said the company believes the allegations are "factually incorrect and unsubstantiated," adding that Amazon strictly prohibits the "use or sharing of non-public, seller-specific data for the benefit of any seller, including sellers of private brands." Yet the results are right there for all to see. If you sell any product through Amazon, you are exposing your company's operations to them. If you want to keep that information to yourself, then you don't get to reach your customers, which in reality are Amazon's customers. If you want to buy something online, and get it shipped as quickly as possible, then Amazon is a blessing. Most often than not, you are not buying the product directly from Amazon. An independent store or vendor with a presence on Amazon will fulfill your order. The seller only has minor identifying characteristics on the platform. On the search result page, the space designated to the seller is small and insignificant. The customer has very few reminders that products are offered by anyone but Amazon. (Although if you want to dispute a sale, you are starkly reminded that the item is from a 3rd party vendor.) So there is no surprise when companies embrace AI internally, they are putting themselves at the risk of sharing their product with their competitors. Maybe the most obvious example is when Antropic came up with Claude Design. A tool to help users generate designs, wireframes, etc. Kinda like Figma. That's not a problem on its own, but when Antropic's chief product officer sits on Figma's board of directors, you can't say that there isn't a conflict of interest there. In fact, the chief product officer resigned from the board merely days before Claude Design was announced. He basically extracted all value from Figma then resigned. Figma's AI features are built on top of Claude. So Anthropic literally pulled an Amazon Basic on Figma. When companies force their own employees to use AI to do their day to day work, they are basically asking employees to upload company data to a 3rd party that may become a competitor. Sure something in the contract clause says that the AI company won't train on enterprise customer data, but nothing stops them from peaking at successful product data. Whenever someone tells me that they used AI to build an app and boast of its values or uniqueness, I want to remind them that if you can just prompt-create a product, so can the AI provider. In fact, they might have better resources to create a competing product if it displays any sign of success (see Figma). While it looks like plenty of people are benefitting from AI today, all this information is being shared with AI providers. We are giving them full access to our thought process. When you include them in your workflow, you are basically providing them with a step by step approach on how to do your job. Don’t be surprised when you see a native Antropic/OpenAi project management application suite. Or a CRM, or any software that is trying to integrate with AI and may experience success. A few years back, when I worked in Customer Service Automation, we discovered that most companies used Zendesk to manage their customer service. Since customers mainly contacted support via email, an intentional database had been built that tracked users through their shopping experience throughout the web. While so much could be done with that data, like identifying “problematic” customers, or recommending products based on their history, we ended up finding something more helpful. We could easily detect a pattern of issues for certain shipping carriers. We could see when UPS was having delays in certain cities, or when Fedex was having technical issues when updating the last mile status. None of these things were features designed or provided by anyone. However, having access to businesses’ data gave us insight where we had none before. That became a feature for us, only because we were not competitors to all these online retailers. When you expose your company's internal data to a potential competitor, don’t be surprised when they build a competing business to rival you.
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By a mile, the iPhone Duo has garnered more questions about what I think about it than any other phone I’ve ever had. It’s clearly a phone that has people intrigued, so I thought I’d jot down some loose, unorganized thoughts about what I think about it after about ten days. If I could sum all my thoughts up into one word, it’d simply be “fun”. I think for the vast majority of people, myself included, the iPhone 18 Pro is a more practical phone that through scientific analysis you’d likely even find a better phone. Even if they were priced the same, its package is more traditionally comfortable and ergonomic, with a better quality main camera, a helpful telephoto camera, a screen that’s more practical to use more of the time, a better biometric system (Face ID versus Touch ID) and a more established software experience. But damn if the iPhone Duo isn’t fun. Phones have been downright boring for so long. Incredible technology, lovely apps, but the hardware has been a bit slow moving since the iPhone X. Maybe that’s why I jumped onto the iPhone Air so readily. Even that slight departure from “black slab of glass” to “a dramatically thinner black slab of glass” was exciting versus what we’ve grown accustomed to. So I pick up the Duo, and it’s kinda just exciting to hold a phone for the first time in ages. Maybe that’s a honeymoon period and after a few months I’ll be over it. Maybe everyone who tries a folding phone for the first time experiences this. And to be clear, it’s not just all raw novelty. The fun aspect is fueled by having an absolutely incredible inner screen that fundamentally transforms what a phone is and can be. In addition, support the Apple Pencil has turned out to be phenomenally handy for me to be able to jot down quick thoughts and notes. For downsides, Touch ID is objectively worse than Face ID, but honestly, I don’t mind it as much as I expected I would. The smaller camera sensor than the Pro series phones is still decidedly great (rumors were it was a 17e size which was not correct, it’s the size of the normal 17’s). Software support gets better by the day, though iOS on the Duo is still decidedly a bit buggy at times. Other random thoughts Touch ID is objectively worse than Face ID, but honestly, I don’t mind it as much as I expected I would, previewing notifications is where I miss it the most After getting used to having a single speaker in the iPhone Air for a year, having stereo (not to mention great sounding) speakers is amazing The FaceTime camera on the inside is indeed not great for selfies/photography but honestly perfectly acceptable for FaceTime, and I’d definitely prefer this solution over a cutout on the inside so I’m happy! It definitely has a heavy feel to it, but it’s nothing honestly that bothersome A lot of the reviews said something to the effect of “the crease is practically invisible” and while I don’t really mind it or anything I definitely would disagree with that statement, you can see it a fair bit even with light content The hinge is a bit harder to open than I expected, I’ve found the secret is don’t pry from the middle of the side, instead put a thumb near the top and bottom (also helps prevent pressing Camera Control instead which I was doing all the time). I imagine this is necessary to have it be able to stop at arbitrary angles once open (which I do like) and hopefully it loosens up a bit with more use, but playing with Android foldables at Best Buy I did find their hinge easier to open I am really split on the inner, nano texture screen. It definitely helps reflections, has a neat look to it, and is super nice to draw on with the pencil, but it’s significantly less vibrant than the outer display which to my eyes looks a fair bit nicer. I think they made the right decision ultimately but it’s definitely not a zero-compromise solution. I was considering nano texture on my next MacBook but after this I think I’ll stick with glossy. My glass half full take with the Duo for now though is that we get two really cool screens to play with The outer screen is awesome for taking photos, unlike taller iPhones, your viewfinder fills the screen completely so it’s the largest feeling viewfinder I’ve used on a phone I miss the action button, nice little launcher for ChatGPT/Claude depending on which month it is Battery life is downright phenomenal versus my iPhone Air and 15 Pro (two devices admittedly not known for having great battery life) So, I don’t think the Duo is for most people who either don’t care much about phones, or care a lot about having the perfect phone, but for a decent amount of people in the middle I think the Duo represents a fundamentally different experience, that’s a ton of fun, and I’m excited to be excited about a phone again. (But, Apple, please figure out a way to add a telephoto lens.)
Going through a collection of old parts, CuriousMarc encountered some ICs that he couldn't identify. He opened up one of these ICs, and I studied it under the microscope. After some reverse engineering, I determined that it was a logic chip that implemented four NAND gates using old-fashioned diode-transistor logic (DTL).1 The chip turned out to be the ST680A, a member of the Signetics 600 series of chips from 1965. In this article, I discuss the circuitry in this chip and how diode-transistor logic works. The die of the ST680A under the microscope. Integrated circuits can be packaged in many ways. One of the most popular is the plastic DIP (Dual In-line Package), a black rectangle of epoxy with two rows of metal pins. This type of package was invented by Signetics: "Introduced in late 1965, the 600 series was the first integrated circuit family to be offered in a solid, plastic, dual in-line package (DIP)." Earlier integrated circuits were packaged in round metal cans or in small flat-packs. In 1965, engineers at Fairchild invented the DIP, which had two rows of pins on 0.1" spacing. Unlike the surface-mounted flat-pack, the DIP had pins that were inserted into holes, making manual or automated assembly quick and easy. Because the pins of a DIP were on a regular grid, rather than the circular pattern of a metal can, circuit board design and manufacturing were also easier (details). The first DIP chips had ceramic packages. The plastic DIP, introduced by Signetics, was much cheaper and became very popular. An advertisement for the Signetics 600 series. From Electronics, March 21, 1966. The plastic DIP is less popular with me, however, because it is harder to open. With a ceramic package, I can simply tap it with a chisel and pop it open, but that doesn't work with epoxy packages. An epoxy package can be dissolved with nitric or sulfuric acid, but I try to avoid dangerous acids. Instead, CuriousMarc used Antoine's hot air decapping method. Unfortunately, the hot air technique doesn't always work. In this case, tiny bits of epoxy were stuck to the die, obscuring the circuitry. I used a few drops of boiling sulfuric acid to clean the die. (I'm okay with sulfuric acid in tiny quantities.) The die on its metal frame. The photo above shows the silicon die on its metal frame, the lead frame. The golden blobs are where the bond wires were attached to the die. You can see the doped silicon regions that form diodes and bipolar NPN transistors, as well as 16 resistors in the center, forming serpentine paths. Most chips have a passivation layer—a thin layer of silicon dioxide—over the chip. Inconveniently, this old chip didn't have a passivation layer, so the acid also stripped off the metal layer. (A few remnants are visible in the upper left.) Without the metal layer, I had to guess at how the components were connected to form logic gates. The die has very faint color differences where the silicon was protected by the metal, so that helped. Eventually, I came up with the diagram below, showing how the metal layer was probably configured. This wiring reveals that the chip implements four DTL NAND gates, which I'll describe in more detail below. One puzzle was that the chip has two unused diodes, indicated with question marks below. The metal layer for a quad NAND chip. I desaturated the image to make the labels clearer. Transistors, diodes, and resistors In this section, I'll explain how the patterns in the image correspond to components of the circuit. The silicon die is doped with various impurities to form regions with different electrical characteristics. These regions appear red or green under the microscope due to thin-film effects. As a result, the chip's transistors, diodes, and resistors are visible. The chip is made from bipolar NPN transistors, which have a completely different construction from the MOS transistors in modern ICs. In an NPN transistor, the current from the collector to the emitter is controlled by the current through the base. The collector is a large region of N-type silicon, silicon that is doped with atoms such as phosphorus or arsenic. Since these elements have one more valence electron than silicon, they give the silicon more negative charge carriers, so it is called N for negative. The N-type silicon happens to appear reddish. On top of the collector, the base is a thin region of P-type silicon, which appears green. This silicon has been doped with atoms such as boron or gallium, which have one fewer valence electron than silicon. The missing electrons form "holes", which act as positive charge carriers. Finally, the emitter is N-type silicon, on top of the base layer. These layers work together through semiconductor magic, amplifying the base current. Two NPN transistors on the chip. The second transistor is a larger output transistor. The chip's output transistors are slightly larger so they can sink more current. In the transistor on the right above, note that the collector contact wraps around three sides of the transistor. The emitter is also larger, with an L-shaped contact. According to the datasheet, each output transistor can sink 2.5 mA of current. The chip uses many diodes since it is diode-transistor logic. The structure of a diode is similar to a transistor, but without the emitter. In a diode, current flows from the cathode (P-type silicon) to the anode (N-type). A diode and a resistor on the chip. The chip uses 16 resistors, located in the middle of the die. A resistor is constructed from a long, thin region of doped silicon. Since silicon has moderately high resistance, a long strip of silicon acts as a resistor. Most of the resistors have a serpentine layout to fit a long resistor into a smaller area. These resistors consist of P-type silicon (green) in a "tub" of N-type silicon (red). The tub is connected to the positive voltage supply; since current doesn't flow from N-type silicon to P-type silicon, this isolates the resistors from each other. Operation of a DTL gate Logic gates can be created in many ways. The earliest integrated circuits (such as the ones in the Apollo Guidance Computer) used Resistor-Transistor Logic (RTL), where logic gates were constructed from resistors and transistors. In March 1962, Signetics announced the first family of commercial Diode-Transistor Logic (DTL) integrated circuits (details). By using diodes on the inputs instead of resistors, DTL provided better performance than RTL. However, DTL soon became overshadowed by TTL (Transistor-Transistor Logic), which was faster and used less power. (If you built digital circuits a few decades ago, you're probably familiar with the popular 7400 series of TTL chips.) The diagram below shows how the DTL NAND gate works. If both inputs are high, the current from the first resistor flows through the base of the first transistor, turning it on. The transistor amplifies this current, passing a much larger current from the transistor's collector to the transistor's emitter. This current goes through the base of the second transistor, which turns on the second transistor. The second transistor passes an even larger current from the output pin to ground, pulling the output pin low. The DTL NAND gate with both inputs high. The schematic is from the datasheet. This circuit is considerably more complicated than the DTL gate on Wikipedia. But if one of the input pins is pulled low, the current from the resistor goes through the diode instead of the transistor. The first transistor turns off, and without a base current, the second transistor turns off. The third resistor pulls the output high. Thus, the output is low only if both inputs are high: a NAND gate. The DTL NAND gate with an input low. I'll point out a few features of this circuit. The diodes on the inputs ensure that one input doesn't affect the other input. The diode in the middle raises the voltage on the first transistor's emitter, so it requires more voltage to turn on, reducing the sensitivity to noise. The output uses a resistor to pull the output high; more advanced circuits use another transistor. When the output is low, the third resistor is still "trying" to pull the output high, which is wasting power. Moreover, the resistor limits the output current, so the high output is fairly weak. In some DTL families, you can get gates with different values for the output resistor, so you can select the tradeoff between wasting power and having an output that is too weak. If you've used TTL integrated circuits from the 1970s, you know that chips usually have power and ground on diagonal pins: ground on pin 7 and power on pin 14. (Putting power and ground diagonally opposite both helps die layout and circuit board layout.) Much to my surprise, I found that the Signetics chips predate this standard and have ground on pin 1 and power on pin 8: still diagonal, but the wrong diagonal! The diagram below shows how the four NAND gates are wired in the chip. Pinout of the 680A quad NAND gate. From the databook. Three chips from one die When I examined the die under the microscope, I figured out the circuit, but I was puzzled by two extra diodes, as if two NAND gates had a third input that wasn't used. The explanation is that Signetics used the same silicon layout for at least three different chips, applying a different metal layer for different functionality. This saved money since it's much cheaper to produce a single optical mask for the metal layer than a complete set of new masks. Signetics sold semi-custom ICs to customers, using an approach called variFEBS (Variable Functional Electronics Blocks). This approach used a custom metal layer on top of fixed silicon, providing custom circuits without the cost of a full mask set. These circuits didn't sell well, but Signetics used the same approach for standard ICs. Pinout of the 670A triple NAND gate and the 616A quad NAND gate. All three chips have some similarities, such as using pins 2 and 14 as outputs. From the databook. One IC with the same silicon as the quad NAND gate is the 670A chip, which has three NAND gates, each with three inputs (above left). The diagram below shows how the silicon can be wired to provide this functionality. The hypothesized metal layer for the 670A triple-NAND gate. The layout for the triple chip above is a bit tricky because the top gate has inputs on both sides of the power (Vcc) pin. This creates a layout problem because the power and ground metal runs vertically to the resistors, blocking metal wiring from one side to the other. The solution is a "crossunder", a region of silicon that allows a signal to pass under the metal layer, connecting the inputs on the left to the rest of the circuitry on the right. This crossunder is visible near the top of the chip. Another chip with the same layout is the 616A dual NAND gate, with five inputs on each gate. Since this chip has 10 inputs in total (compared to 8 on the quad gate), this chip uses the two "extra" diodes that I spotted. If that isn't enough inputs, each NAND gate has an expansion input; by connecting external diodes to the expansion input, the gate can be made as large as desired. The hypothesized metal layer for the 616A dual-NAND chip. Some history The history of Signetics is closely tied to Fairchild. The story of Fairchild's founding is well known: in 1957, eight engineers—the Traitorous Eight—left Shockley Semiconductor and created Fairchild Semiconductor. Hundreds of companies (the "Fairchildren") were started by engineers who left Fairchild. Signetics was one of those companies, formed in 1961 and said to be the first company to exclusively design and manufacture integrated circuits.2 Signetics announced its first product in 1962, a NAND gate that cost $125 (over $1000 in current dollars).3 Not surprisingly, sales were weak. Signetics soon ran short of money, so in 1962, Corning Glass invested $1.7 million for 51% ownership of Signetics. Corning Glass may seem like a strange investor, but Corning was more of a high-tech company than you'd expect, making components such as resistors and glass capacitors, and later creating fiber optics. Moreover, in the early 1960s, integrated circuits were the hot area (much like AI now), and everyone wanted to get involved. In 1963, the Department of Defense pushed for contractors to use integrated circuits in new products. Riding this wave, Signetics became the leading producer of integrated circuits.4 However, Fairchild soon introduced a series of DTL chips that competed with Signetics. The Fairchild 930 series was faster than the Signetics chips and less than half the price, so Fairchild took much of the market from Signetics and dominated the IC market. Signetics also produced analog integrated circuits. Signetics is probably best known for creating the 555 timer chip in 1970, said to be the world's most popular IC, with billions sold.5 Signetics was acquired by Philips in 1975, and then Philips Semiconductors was spun off as NXP (Next exPerience) in 2006. NXP is currently the #10 semiconductor manufacturer worldwide, so the heritage of Signetics lives on. For more, follow me on Bluesky (@righto.com), Mastodon (@[email protected]), or RSS. Thanks to CuriousMarc for providing the IC and thanks to TubeTime for finding the databook. AI statement: Despite the presence of the em dash, no AI was used in the writing of this article (details). Notes and references After I had reverse-engineered the chip, TubeTime found datasheets for it, making my reverse engineering unnecessary. (See the Signetics Condensed Catalog 1969, Utilogic II Databook 1971, and Utilogic 2 Databook 1972.) We must have been unlucky with our original web searches since we didn't find anything. But this way you get to see what's inside the chip :-) The Signetics ST680A IC in its package. The large circular depression marks pin 1. From the date code, this chip is from 1971. ↩ For more Signetics history, see Signetics Founding History, written by Lionel Kattner, a co-founder of Signetics. He states that the company name was inspired by the words "signals" and "networks", as well as the high-tech suffix "-netics". ↩ See History of Semiconductor Engineering, page 156. ↩ The book Making Silicon Valley describes the history of Signetics. It has a negative view of the Corning investment, saying that Signetics executives "Van Poppelen and Kattner dissented on the grounds that Corning was not a good fit for an integrated circuit company. In their view, Corning was a staid Eastern firm, ignorant about semiconductors and antithetic to the ways and culture of the electronics industry on the West Coast. Their view later proved to be correct." ↩ The 555 timer was created by analog IC wizard Hans Camenzind. If you're interested in analog circuits, you should read his book Designing Analog Chips, which you can download for free. ↩
A great deal of effort has gone into understanding the regulatory burden on housing construction, and the extent to which it contributes to high housing prices.
