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| Greetings! |
 | | for extreme environments |
Welcome to Tekmos Talks October. This month's newsletter will share about Tekmos' Guarantee, Tekmos Quality Standards, and News Highlights of company activities and accomplishments for September including the successful launch of our High Temperature ASIC and High Temperature Micros 175/250C, the hottest in the world!
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From the Desk of the President
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 | Lynn Reed, President
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Tekmos guarantees that our chips will work, or we will fix it at our cost. And fortunately, most chips do work the first time. But when they do not, we have to determine what went wrong before we can fix it.
ASICs tend to be easy to debug. That is because they are fully defined, and so the operation of the circuit is well understood. If there is an ASIC failure, it is usually an interface problem involving I/O levels. There is the published specification, and that real specification that is determined by the system that uses the ASIC. The chip can fail if there is a difference between the two. We have a saying that we always get what we ask for, but that may not be what we want.
Microcontrollers are much more difficult to debug. We produce the chip, but the operation is determined by the software. And since we make replacements for older microcontrollers, we are frequently in the situation where all we have is the binary executable file, and the source code is long lost. The problems also frequently occur at long time periods, beyond the time span that we can easily simulate. Simulations become difficult beyond one million clocks, which represents less than 1 second in real time. A chip that fails after a minute cannot be easily simulated.
So what do you do with a piece of plastic that fails to respond after a minute, with an unknown embedded program, and no external clues?
The first approach is to study the code. If we don't have the source, we can disassemble it and produce a listing that is almost legible. Then we search for common mistakes such as reading undefined bits, and performing subsequent operations such as AND or OR which assume that the undefined bits are known. There can also be combinations of operations that might exercise hardware in ways that we might not have considered, such as changing baud rates in the middle of a transmission.
Looking at the code will solve half of the problems, which leaves us with the more difficult problems. That is when we turn to emulators. As part of our development cycle, we build FPGA based emulators for most of our processors. The emulator allows us to run our design, executing customer code, in customer systems before we committed to silicon. The nice thing about an emulator is that we can synthesize a logic analyzer into the emulator along with our micro design, and use it to debug the problem.
If all else fails, we can always use ion-beam technology to verify internal signals, though we have been fortunate to never have had to do that.
Once the problem is understood, then it can be fixed, either in software or through a design revision of the chip.
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Tekmos Quality Corner
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Tekmos has passed the first annual Continuing Assessment Audit from BSI. This is an important part of maintaining our ISO 9001:2008 certification and is a fantastic opportunity to show off our continually improving Quality Management System. The process is a bit like spring cleaning, you are not terribly excited about the event, but you have the opportunity to go through the old, decide what you liked and didn't like, do away with the not useful, and make plans and room for what you want over the next year. We have gone through the closets, dusted, cleaned and polished. We find that just when you think you have done something as well as it can be done, there is always room to do it a little better still. That is the philosophy we bring to Tekmos every day and what we will be bringing to our customers throughout the next year.
Jon Gehm
Director of Operations
to learn more about BSI ...
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Tekmos News Highlights
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Tekmos Travels: In September, Tekmos participated in a vendor show at Halliburton where a lot of interest was expressed in our High Temperature ASICs and microcontroller products. Tekmos Manufacturing: In Tekmos' constant efforts of providing excellence to our customers, we purchased a new 320 pin tester to upgrade our test capacity. This replaces an older 224 pin tester, and will allow us to test high pin count ASICs with our own test facilities. Tekmos Product Development: Tekmos received a rush order for a ROM version of the 87C751. The customer required a SSOP Package, and the flash die we use in the 87C751 would not fit. The ROM is a smaller die and fits in the small SSOP Package. We taped out at the end of September, and plan on delivering prototypes in late October. |
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Manufacturing Representative Highlight:
Astrorep Inc. began successfully representing quality electronic component manufacturers in the Metropolitan New York and Northern New Jersey market in 1968. Since its inception, Astrorep has maintained a design centric focus assisting their customers with technical and commercial expertise. Working closely with their customers engineering, purchasing, and logistics departments the Astrorep team fully understands their customers' requirements and direction. This leads to their ultimate objective, influencing their customers' choice of product, in their design.
With effective design and sales strategies, Astrorep Inc. expanded its' territory in 2005 into the Mid-Atlantic and Chesapeake Regions under the name Envision Design Tech, an Astrorep Inc. Company. This expansion was initiated by request, from their principles with a need for effective engineering and sales coverage in these two additional markets.
Effectively servicing a broad range of market segments including, industrial, military, communication, and medical for all three Regions requires a synergistic line offering with broad appeal and sustainability. Having the ability to continue to supply the needs of long term programs found frequently in the military and medical markets with the constant changing and upgrading of components creates a potential design nightmare. The solution for Astrorep in these cases is Tekmos.
The ability of Tekmos to offer solutions in these situations has on many occasions helped our customers continue to support long term programs containing discontinued product, long lead time items, or extremely high price increases. These solutions are sound and guaranteed to work, as our customers have come to realize. The Tekmos offering of Microcontrollers, Asics, and Logic conversions offers the flexibility needed for these demanding designs.
Astrorep, Inc. territory covers the Mid Atlantic states (New Jersey, Eastern Pa, Metro NY, Long Island and Chesapeake territory (Delaware, Maryland, D.C., and Virginia.
Submitted by Mike Villanti - Astrorep - President.
141 John St. Suite #300, Babylon, NY 11702
631-422-2500
Astrorep, Inc.
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Thank you for reading Tekmos Talks. Contact Bob Abrams, Vice President of Sales & Business Development, call (512) 342-9871 or email Sales for more information on our most recent "tape outs", our high temperature ASIC, or our other quality products.
We appreciate our customers. Tekmos is looking back while innovating for tomorrow.
Sincerely, Lynn Reed, President Tekmos4120 Commercial Center Drive, Suite 400Austin, TX 78744Phone: (512) 342-9871Fax: (512) 342-9873Email: Sales@Tekmos.com |
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