Rest In Peace Jim Williams

This week has been a sad one for anyone doing analog design. Jim Williams of Linear Technology died suddenly and unexpectedly from a stroke on June 12th. More on Jim here.

Jim is survived by his wife Siu and son Michael. His family requests that donations in Jim's memory be made to The Parkinson's Institute, 675 Almanor Avenue, Sunnyvale, CA 94085.

Archive of Jim's analog design collected writings can be found here and here. After reading those you will understand why we have lost the best among us.

I once had my own Jim Williams encounter, back at the height of the Dot Com Bubble around 1998, when I was writing Circuit Cellar Online Resource Pages. Out of the blue Jim called me up to tell me that I was miss applying his LT1088 (Yes it was his design, that he had to convince LT to make it), RMS wave form to Heat converter. We had a lengthy discussion on how to measure esoteric wave forms from even more esoteric sources (always work with First Principles if you can, like heat in the LT1088).

We never know when our own number is going to come up. Find an industry that lets you spend more time with your family and less time at work...

Soldering Defect Database: How many ways can a solder joint fail? More than you might think.

The National Physical Laboratory (NPL), in the UK, has opened their Defect Database to the public. Of specific interest to us is the Soldering Defects Database.

When you go to the Soldering Defects Database, you are asked for an email address (not sure why?), once entered a set of pull-down menus is shown, allowing us to narrow the filed of defects that we want to search. If you want to see all of the defects simply hit "Submit Query", without selecting anything. This brings up a long page of pictures of the various types of defects.

NPL is also accepting submissions of solder defects not already covered.

An entry in the IPC Blog Introducing Defect of the Month from NPL and IPC: Toe Fillet Defects, introduces the new Defect of the Month video series; Gimpel Software's Bug of the Month comes to mind.

Steve Ciarcia, of Circuit Cellar Magazine, has been known to say that his favorite programming language was solder. Consider these defects to be the 'compiler errors' of the hardware realm.