Re: Drat. NTE is gone, and they took the last 5-GHz PNP with them.

On 2024-09-06 08:47, Chris Jones wrote:

On 5/09/2024 7:54 am, Phil Hobbs wrote:

The NTE2403, similar to the BFT92, but a bit better overall.  Dunno who actually made them. (I saw the news on s.e.repair today.)
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Rochester claims to have 1,500,000 of the 2SA1462 (1.8 GHz) for 20 cents, but that's all she wrote.
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I have a couple of reels of BFT92s and one of BFG31s, so I'm good for protos and small production, but I can't use PNP wraparound bootstraps for customer designs anymore. :(
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Barstids.
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Cheers
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Phil Hobbs
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  If most your designs are similar enough, perhaps you can consilidate it into a single version and persuade Analog Devices to make it on their XFCB3 process, either if you pay NRE and the design belongs to you, sold as a custom part that they can only sell via you, or that they sell themself and somehow give you a royalty. If you had a patent it might help with that negotiation.
 The other option I can imagine is that there might be a fab in China capable of makine fast PNPs and who might find some pride in selling a faster PNP than any western company does.
   

I've considered doing that sort of thing.  We've done a couple of IC designs in the past couple of years, in collaboration with a design house in Tucson, but that was fancier than we'd really need.
I'd very much like to do a dual laser noise canceller chip on a decent junction-isolated complementary bipolar process with superbeta NPNs. There are all sorts of tricks you can play with that.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC / Hobbs ElectroOptics
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510
http://electrooptical.net
http://hobbs-eo.com