Category: Hardware Development

It’s been a few weeks since I had a few interactions with the Intel Corporation, so I thought I’d write up a summary of what I think they’re screwing up from the small-developer / indie-developer perspective, in case whoever they choose as their next CEO is open to actual, on-the-ground perspectives.

The start of the story goes something like this: I had an idea about building a piece of electronics using their Thunderbolt 3 connectivity chips. It wasn’t such a huge idea, let’s say, but it would’ve been interesting to me, and it provided an excuse to learn more about the technology.

Continue reading Whither Intel?

When building electronic hardware prototypes, one major source of frustration for circuit designers is the difference in chip package sizes, even when they are identically named.

Each integrated-circuit manufacturer usually has slightly different specifications for their version of SO-8, TSSOP-20, QFN32, LQFP-64, and so on.

To get some clarity on the topic, and to see how each manufacturer’s dimensions could differ, I compiled together a bunch of excerpts from various publicly-available packaging datasheets.

I wanted to put these excerpts all in one place, so that I could visually and numerically check the differences (something humans are still good at, take that machines!)

So without further ado, please find the results of the survey at this Github repo, and please feel to either comment here or in the issues there if you have any suggestions. Pull requests are also always welcome.