On 8/9/2015 2:16 PM, Bob Camp wrote:

This has been discussed on time-nuts before:
https://www.febo.com/pipermail/time-nuts/2014-July/085445.html

A few months ago I too contacted Everset about getting some chips.

So over a year has passed and the new chips are not available.

Which is why asked for a "simple receiver",

Another discussion talks about the patent Everset has, I do not think
others will be joining the party.

The chip I chose is one of many 20 year old chips.
Except the Everset chip, there have been no new chips developed in over
20 years.

As they say in the old country, "Oh well"

Hi

If you never have tried to keep an IC in production, there are some basic things
that may not be very obvious:

1. Chip geometries shrink fast. A 4 year old production geometry is essentialy obsolete.
2. Manufacturing lines either are retired or re-tooled to the new rules on a regular basis
   a line that is still running the same process and gear it had 4-6 years ago is a rarity.
3. Digital stuff shrinks with some fairly simple rules. You still pay (big) bucks to
   re-tool the masks for the new process. That phone call comes in about every 4 years.
4. Analog stuff does not shrink with simple rules. You re-model and (effectively)
   redesign the part each time you change process. Add that on top of the charges
   for the digital process.

You would think that keeping an old like open would make sense. Basic math
unfortunately is not on your side. Make 1/10 as many chips on that line (and 1/10 the
batch sizes) and the cost goes through the roof. That’s fine for those who can afford
to pay $100 for a chip that used to cost $2. For the rest of us, not so good a solution.

No matter how cool all the design rules get, you still have to go dice the wafer. That’s a
process that does not shrink much with time.  There is a minimum size they can dice a wafer
down to. The same ~1 mm x 1 mm rule works today that worked back in 1970. If you have a
function that uses one gate, it’s still going to be on a minimum sized die.

The new process costs less per transistor than the old process. It probably costs more per square
yard of silicon. A chip that made sense at some number of devices on the old process makes
more sense at 4X that number of devices on the new process. Effectively you get a bunch
more capability for free on a minimum sized die.

A consumer IC will sell in the “> thousands per day” range at it’s peak. A successful IC will sell
at a 10X multiple past that. That’s what gets the prices down to the level that we get used
to seeing. Drop back to  <50K a year and you get a phone call from the foundry about “last
time buy”.

Can you move your gizmo to a new foundary when you get that call? Sure you can. Expect
to pay for new masks and all the modeling runs that go with them. There’s a couple of bucks
onto the price of each IC you make.

If you are selling into a cost sensitive application, (and who isn’t), the expectation is that the price
of components comes down at a fairly steep rate every quarter (or at least every year). Start bumping
the price up and your customer is going to look for an alternative. Down goes volume some more.

None of this even begins to get into the test and quality assurance part of keeping an IC going. It
also does not look at things like field support, inventory, and marketing. None of those things are
free.

That all seems a bit much. It’s not. I’ve been in the middle of a lot of these phone calls
over the years. There’s been a lot of money spent on new masks and redesigns. The amazing
thing is not that IC’s go out of production on a regular basis. The amazing thing is that any of them
stay IN production for more than 8 or 10 years.

The net result is pretty much always that the simple old devices get replaced with ever more
complex new alternatives. The new ones may be harder to find for a basement hobbyist . The guys
who use them in volume know right were to get them. The volume of basic IC’s has been dropping
for years and will continue to do so. (That’s in pieces, in dollars … wow!)

Bob

Hi

I have a watch on my wrist and a clock on the wall. Both synch to WWVB. They use chips to do this.
The silicon in the watch came out about 4 years ago. The chip in the clock is about 7 years old.
The watch chip is now obsolete and has been replaced by a newer one. I have not taken a hammer
to a newer clock to see what they are now using. New chips for WWVB are very much being actively
designed all the time. They integrate a lot of functions in the chip beyond a simple receiver.

Bob

On 8/9/15 4:33 PM, Bob Camp wrote:

There's always Rochester Electronics.. "leaders in the trailing edge"
(no kidding, that's their slogan)..

They buy old fabs, masks, etc, and keep producing small runs of older
parts.  For a price.

At some point, multiproject wafers (like MOSIS) might become a hobby
product.  So far, it's in the "several kilobuck" minimum purchase, and,
as well, the tools aren't easy to come by. Or, more properly, good
design tools are expensive, tedious design tools are free.. you CAN
layout an IC for MOSIS with a ruler and and a quadrille pad.. get your
copy of Carver and Mead and have at it)

For digital stuff, small boards with FPGAs or microcontrollers on them
are probably the sweet spot for small runs.

The same is not true for analog.

Hi Jim -

You wrote:
At some point, multiproject wafers (like MOSIS) might become a hobby
product.  So far, it's in the "several kilobuck" minimum purchase, and,
as well, the tools aren't easy to come by. Or, more properly, good
design tools are expensive, tedious design tools are free.. you CAN
layout an IC for MOSIS with a ruler and and a quadrille pad.. get your
copy of Carver and Mead and have at it)

I assume that you mean Carver Mead and Lynn Conway, Introduction to VLSI System Design 1978.

I am enjoying this thread!

Regards, John Allen K1AE

-----Original Message-----
From: time-nuts [mailto:time-nuts-bounces@febo.com] On Behalf Of Jim Lux
Sent: Sunday, August 09, 2015 9:12 PM
To: time-nuts@febo.com
Subject: Re: [time-nuts] wtd: WWVB info

On 8/9/15 4:33 PM, Bob Camp wrote:

There's always Rochester Electronics.. "leaders in the trailing edge"
(no kidding, that's their slogan)..

They buy old fabs, masks, etc, and keep producing small runs of older
parts.  For a price.

At some point, multiproject wafers (like MOSIS) might become a hobby
product.  So far, it's in the "several kilobuck" minimum purchase, and,
as well, the tools aren't easy to come by. Or, more properly, good
design tools are expensive, tedious design tools are free.. you CAN
layout an IC for MOSIS with a ruler and and a quadrille pad.. get your
copy of Carver and Mead and have at it)

For digital stuff, small boards with FPGAs or microcontrollers on them
are probably the sweet spot for small runs.

The same is not true for analog.

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On 8/9/15 7:57 PM, John Allen wrote:

Yup, Mead and Conway.. I misspoke/mistyped..
that's the one.

Hi Donald,

On the page referenced by Alex later in this thread, there is a link to
Galleon as a US distributor of the HKW modules and WWVB receiver chip:
http://www.ntp-time-server.com/wwvb-receiver/wwvb-receiver.html
where the price may or may not be lower than direct shipping from EU,
or availability could be as vaporous as elsewhere.

--
Take care. Thanks, Brian Inglis

On 2015-08-09 20:38, Donald wrote:

it looks like somebody already made a decoder for a wwvb like
transmission, see here:

Performance Analysis and Receiver Architectures of DCF77
Radio-Controlled Clocks

• Daniel Engeler
  Daniel Engeler
  <researcher/75928367_Daniel_Engeler>

Zuhlke Engineering AG, Schlieren, Switzerland.
IEEE transactions on ultrasonics, ferroelectrics, and frequency control
<journal/1525-8955_IEEE_transactions_on_ultrasonics_ferroelectrics_and_frequency_control>
(Impact Factor: 1.5). 05/2012; 59(5):869-84. DOI: 10.1109/TUFFC.2012.2272
Source: PubMed http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22622972

ABSTRACT DCF77 is a long-wave radio transmitter located in Germany.
Atomic clocks generate a 77.5-kHz carrier which is amplitude- and
phase-modulated to broadcast the official time. The signal is used by
industrial and consumer radio-controlled clocks. DCF77 faces competition
from the Global Positioning System (GPS) which provides higher accuracy
time. Still, DCF77 and other long-wave time services worldwide remain
popular because they allow indoor reception at lower cost, lower power,
and sufficient accuracy. Indoor long-wave reception is challenged by
signal attenuation and electromagnetic interference from an increasing
number of devices, particularly switched-mode power supplies. This paper
introduces new receiver architectures and compares them with existing
detectors and time decoders. Simulations and analytical calculations
characterize the performance in terms of bit error rate and decoding
probability, depending on input noise and narrow-band interference. The
most promising detector with maximum-likelihood time decoder displays
the time in less than 60 s after power-up and at a noise level of
E(b)/N(0) = 2.7 dB, an improvement of 20 dB over previous receivers. A
field-programmable gate array-based demonstration receiver built for the
purposes of this paper confirms the capabilities of these new
algorithms. The findings of this paper enable future high-performance
DCF77 receivers and further study of indoor long-wave reception.

The DCF77 has very similar modulation scheme as the new wwvb, therefore
the methode used to decode the DCF77 could be used --perhaps with some
modifications -- to decode the phase modulation of the wwvb also
74
KJ6UHN
Alex

On 8/9/2015 7:57 PM, John Allen wrote:

Don, Alex,

That IEEE PDF you're looking for has shown up on a .ru site. Google for "Performance Analysis and Receiver Architectures" and you'll see it near the top. I grabbed a copy to read and so far my PC isn't infected.

The thread that Daniel Engeler (the author of the paper) started on time-nuts is here:
https://www.febo.com/pipermail/time-nuts/2012-June/068021.html

/tvb

----- Original Message -----
From: "Donald" donvukovic@gmail.com
To: "Discussion of precise time and frequency measurement" time-nuts@febo.com
Sent: Friday, August 21, 2015 10:03 AM
Subject: Re: [time-nuts] wtd: WWVB info

see above