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IEEE Membership & Staff
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From GHN
| Milestone Buildings Exist
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Yes
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| Milestone Distinguishing Features
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For the first time, a complete 16-bit mono … For the first time, a complete 16-bit monolithic DAC has been integrated into a single chip with all the components necessary for a high performance Digital to Analog converter. Up until this point all 16-bit DACs were multi-chip hybrids that are not functionally complete because external components must be added and they were very costly to build.
When Sony and Philips were designing the Digital Audio players, there were three fundamental problems that needed to be solved:
1) A medium that could store the amount of information needed for high fidelity audio. They started with digital tape, but settled on the compact disc (CD) format.
2) Lowering the cost of the read mechanism (laser) to read the CD.
3) A low cost, high performance DAC to play back the music!
TI / Burr-Brown’s design team were already working on a monolithic DAC for industrial markets, but we really stepped up the pace and were first to market. The differential linearity laser trim algorithm made the DAC inearity laser trim algorithm made the DAC
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| Milestone Obstacles Overcome
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To reduce a multichip hybrid converter de … To reduce a multichip hybrid converter design to a single chip, several obstacles had to be overcome in the late 1970’s or early 1980’s:
Power consumption changes on a single chip will cause thermal gradients that affect temperature sensitive components introducing offset, gain, and/or linearity errors. Since thermal gradients on the chip surface take a few hundred microseconds to stabilize after a power change, the settling time of the DAC output could be adversely affected. This phenomenon is sometimes referred to as a thermal settling “tail.”
Minimizing the die size precluded the use of large capacitor values that is common in a hybrid design, for the compensation of amplifiers or for suppressing switching transient.
To realize the new single chip monolithic DAC, and holding the die size to less than 20000 square mils to minimize the cost per die, required an innovative process technology. Rather than using a conventional 40 V bipolar process used for many analog circuits, a thinner epi process yielding 20 V BVCEO transistors was chosen. This saved considerable die area as typical transistor geometries are approximately 50 percent smaller. ries are approximately 50 percent smaller.
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| Milestone Present Site Owner
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Texas Instruments Incorporated
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| Milestone Site Access Details
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The building is one of many at TI’s North Campus in Dallas, Texas, which is guarded electronically and by booths staffed with security personnel. The public can enter the campus after showing personal identification.
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| Milestone Site Description
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The milestone plaque would be installed ou … The milestone plaque would be installed outside the Semiconductor Building that has other TI landmarks installed. The outside location is chosen so that anyone at the building can easily see the milestone and its significance.
If awarded, a duplicate marker would be placed in TI Tucson where the product design and manufacturing actually happened. esign and manufacturing actually happened.
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| Milestone Site Owner Approval
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Yes +
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| Milestone proposal submitted
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false +
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| Proposed Milestone IEEE Section
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IEEE Dallas Section +
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| Proposed Milestone Location
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Texas Instruments, North Campus
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| Proposed Milestone Name
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16-bit Monolithic DAC +
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| Proposed Milestone Year
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1981 +
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| Modification dateThis property is a special property in this wiki.
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16 July 2012 19:05:05 +
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