[time-nuts] PLL book 3rd edition

[jimlux]

On 3/8/16 8:27 AM, Richard (Rick) Karlquist wrote:
>
>
> On 3/8/2016 3:18 AM, KA2WEU at aol.com wrote:
>> Good Morning,
>> technically you are correct, most buy what they find and live with a
>> compromise. But companies like mine, R&S, test equipment , need superior
>> performance and many parts which we need, we have made by foundries.
>> Numerically controlled oscillators belong to this and modern IQ
>> modulators and arbitrary wave form generators are the norm., much better
>> then many analog  type designs.  Most chips on the market are
>> compromises for power consumption and  phase noise. We now have fraction
>
> I worked for HP/Agilent for 35 years, retiring 2 years ago just before
> the Keysight spinoff.  Yes, they do have proprietary chips made by
> internal and external foundries (for example my phase detector).  Other
> than that one case, I was never able to get any custom
> chips made during my career because of the high NRE cost and
> the need to have either very high volume, or an extreme value
> proposition to cover NRE.  There was a small group of designers
> who designed a handful of fractional-N chips.  The rest of
> us were merely users of them.  Newer designs have tended towards
> COTS frac-N chips.  Similarly, there was a small department of
> designers of NCO's, AWG's, etc (I was in the same lab with these
> guys), and the rest of the engineers were merely users of these
> IC's.
>
> So in terms of the book market, it would be limited to a small
> fraction of the engineers in test and measurement.  And that
> small fraction probably has already gone way beyond any
> technology that has made it into textbooks.  A lot of this
> really advanced work is based on trade secrets that of
> course will only appear in internal documents.
>

Or is subject to export controls because of the specific application. 
While you could probably "generalize" it to get out from under export 
controls, that's a lot of work.  Ulrich and Rick raise interesting points:

The people who really know about this stuff do it for a living, all the 
time, and probably don't have a lot of free time. I've done a couple of 
book chapters, and it's an enormous amount of work, and that's with 
collaborators and editors to help.  I suspect that  for these people the 
problem is not a lack of "funding" from the employer, but, rather, that 
there is more work to do than people to do it.

And, often, the "state of the art" is either proprietary or subject to 
other controls on distribution.  Unless you are in a special situation 
(e.g. you own the company, or it's a small company and the owner(s) 
agree), I can see management not seeing the "value added proposition" 
for letting your talented, knowledgable PLL guru work on getting into a 
form suitable for publication: they'd rather you be making boxes.