Precocious boilers

How about them Boilers? I thought that the freshman class would be pretty good but who knew they would be this good. I think in general it is a "down" year for the Big Ten in men's basketball in general but here they are tied for second a third of the way through the conference season. And they SHOULD win their next three games (or at least be favored going into them). Exciting times once again for the Boilermakers.

Work has been "interesting". They always say that you should never volunteer for anything but in the past couple of weeks I just had to squeak loud enough that I finally got greased. Unfortunately, there was no one who was paying attention to the task of making sure that the final arrangement of the little solder balls on the bottom of the package (the ones that make the connections to the printed circuit board that the part is mounted on) was acceptable to be laid out on the PC board. If it isn't then our customers can't build a cost competitive product and they don't buy our ICs. This would be bad. Of course, once you decide how the solder balls are to be arranged you have to make sure that the places on the edge of the IC that we are designing are in the correct order to mate up with them. And then you have to make sure that the signals on the chip are assigned to the correct pins so that the IC itself can actually be arranged. The IC we are working on has about 450 bonding pads of which about 200 are power and ground (both digital and about eight different flavors of analog which have to be kept separate). This is one of those jobs that nobody wants (there is a LOT of grunt work getting all of the data gathered and a LOT of messing about with spreadsheets to get all of the data organized) but the guy that they had assigned the task had no idea what was involved and he had about three times as much work as he could possibly do assigned to him anyway and he was just letting it slide. It is not hard but its just messy. It gives me something to do :-)

On the home front I think that I have finally recovered from my cold (only coughed half a dozen times in the last 24 hours) and I think that there is light at the end of the tunnel for Alice and her cold (though she is still fighting it). We've just been pretty quiet home bodies trying to fight this thing all month.