Chas Gilmore: You asked if any other particularly ambitious kits come to mind. Two of them. One, we’ve described. That computer line was one hell of an ambitious project.
Steve Leibson: Right.
Chas Gilmore: The other one, much earlier in the early seventies, was the GR-2000, a 25-inch color TV. And it was the first television anywhere that had on-screen channel and time. And it was a kit. I think one year we sold 47,000 of them.
Steve Leibson: Wow!
Chas Gilmore: Yeah. That was like crazy for a kit.
The Heathkit GR-2000 25-inch color television receiver was the first in the world to offer on-screen channel and time indicators generated by internal digital circuitry. Heath sold several styles of wood cabinets and consoles for the completed GR-2000 televisions because back then, televisions were both technological products and furniture. Image credit: Heath Company
Steve Leibson: So how does a company like Heathkit go and get a CRT, a color CRT?
Chas Gilmore: Well, we probably had a 15-person purchasing department, and, I mean, we bought a lot of product, especially considering the fact that, you know, in terms of our cost of goods sold. Theraw cost of goods sold was probably 50%. So, when we were 70ドル million, we were buying 35ドル million worth of parts, and there were plenty of CRT manufacturers to sell us CRTs. Most kits were probably more like 10,000 a year or something. But you know, RCA, Sylvania, quite a number of others, were quite willing to sell us CRTs and other components for our kits. But the thing I was aiming on by bringing up the GR-2000 was phenomenal innovation. Fact is, we had, I think, when Zenith acquired us, 27 patents on improvements to color televisions.
Zenith, interestingly enough, was a very, very patent-oriented company. There was one guy there who had between 400 and 500 patents. They had big patent ceremonies every year for all the engineers who had gotten a patent. They were quite interested. But Heath was doing very innovative work to build a color television at home and get it completely aligned using parts of it, you know, just taking a section of the TV and converting it into a color bar dot generator, and then converting it back to part of the operating TV. There was some pretty ingenious engineering.
Steve Leibson: Yeah.
Chas Gilmore: And, as you probably know from your years of engineering, building a low-cost product, which a lot of Heathkits were, takes talent.
Steve Leibson: Right.
Chas Gilmore: As I remember the guy, the VP of engineering at LumenX, when I first was there, I was talking with him, and he was one of the ones who said, "Hey, you give me enough time and money, and I’ll build you anything." Well, yes, no. The answer is, "I want it below everybody else’s cost and I want it faster. And, by the way, you gotta be able to build it at home with a screwdriver, a pair of pliers, and a soldering iron."
Steve Leibson: Right.So, I guess that leads me to the kit that I’m very familiar with, which is the microwave oven. Who came up with that? That’s just like out of the blue.
Chas Gilmore: Yes, and no, it wasn’t when you consider where we were. We were in Saint Joe, Michigan. By then the company had moved. Benton Harbor, Michigan, was the home of a company called Whirlpool, and Whirlpool had a microwave oven. The product line manager for General Products got hold of the product manager at Whirlpool, and said, "Hey, we’d like to make a kit out of your microwave oven." The Whirlpool manager said, "Well, I guess we could consider that," and sure enough, we made a kit out of that microwave oven. There were a few things that were modified, etc. But it was fundamentally a Whirlpool design. Now the other piece of it is, there isn’t anything about a microwave oven that’s very exotic from an electronics standpoint.
The Heathkit Microwave Oven was a kit version and cosmetic reworking of a Whirlpool microwave oven. Whirlpool’s headquarters were located very close to the Heath Company’s headquarters, so the companies interacted. Image credit: Heath Company
Steve Leibson: Right. It’s mostly a mechanical assembly.
Chas Gilmore: Yes, a big mechanical assembly, but that means it lends itself very nicely to being a kit. And then there were a few things that they were learning. I remember bringing home a prototype [of the microwave oven] and sticking it in our kitchen. My memory is that Polly had gotten the roast out of the freezer and put it in there, and something on the [oven door] interlock failed, and the roast is inside that damn microwave oven. We weren’t getting it out, or she wasn’t, until I came home and disassembled the oven. Then there were some things with burned bread, and it had some interesting twists to it.
Steve Leibson: Well, my own experience was, I built this oven for my mother, and then I went off to school, and it died. I was able to troubleshoot it over the phone and I decided that it had lost a high voltage diode. So, I ordered the diode for her. She wasn’t technical at all.
Chas Gilmore: Yeah.
Steve Leibson: And she opened up the Heathkit manual, and I was able to help her through disassembling the oven, uncoupling the old diode, plugging in the new one, putting it back together, and it worked.
Chas Gilmore: And, you know, one of the things that Heath learned as we began to be more scientific about the marketing and understanding who the customers were, etc, was that as the customer built this kit, you were building up to a big high if they turned it on, and it worked. But then we learned if they turned it on and it didn’t work, of course, the customer’s emotions went down for a bit. But then, when they solved the problem, the high was even bigger than having the completed product work with no troubleshooting.
Steve Leibson: Right, because they learn troubleshooting, and I’ll tell you, I generally made exactly one mistake in every Heathkit that I built, and so I had to troubleshoot every single one of them.
Chas Gilmore: And you wound up with a bigger high. And what that meant is that you weren’t a one-time customer. Our regular customers usually owned about five kits.
Steve Leibson: Yeah. Well, I think I tripled that number easily.
Chas Gilmore: Well, over the years. I figure I built about 150 of them.
Steve Leibson: Yeah, you were in a special position.
Chas Gilmore: Yes, well, absolutely, because one of the neat things was that we had this process, and I think we pretty well discussed it in the article with Lou. But we had a proof-build process to build to check the manual out, and two of the people that were always on the proof-build list were the engineering section manager for that product and the product line manager. And, of course, I filled both positions at various times, so I built a lot of Heathkits, and I still have probably half a dozen which I never got around to building, because by the time I got into an executive position, you were able to draw from inventory, because if the managers in the company were building, they were involved right?
So that turned out to be a pretty damn good program and a very interesting company.
Steve Leibson: Yes. One of a kind.
Chas Gilmore: One of a kind. Heath actually had a pretty good run. And, basically, the kit business went from 1947 to 1992, and I worked, as I said, twenty some odd years there. It was like working in a candy factory. My love had always been instrumentation and measurement. I grew into that as a kid in high school. I’d much rather build a transmitter and start measuring SWR and antennas and doing all kinds of stuff other than getting on the air and talking to people.
Basically, for all of my career, I’ve been involved in instrumentation of one kind or another. So by the time I got to be the director of engineering for the Technical Products position, I had the Ham radio department, and I was a very avid ham. Again, I enjoyed the technical side of hamming.
I had both instrumentation departments and, I mean, I just actually...
Steve Leibson: I understand. I understand.
Chas Gilmore: It was wonderful.
Although the original Heath Company that offered electronic kits ceased to offer the kits in 1992, the Heath Company has been reconstituted and offers a few new kits plus assemblies and a few other accessory kits designed to augment older Heathkits from the company’s heyday. The company’s Website carries this message:
"Heathkit’s destiny is in new hands, under new management and ownership. We know the value and trust you place in the Heathkit name, and we are committed to making Heathkit succeed and flourish.
"... As devoted Heathkit fans know, the parent company name and the ownership of Heathkit have changed a number of times in the roughly 120 or so years since Ed Heath founded the business. Over the decades Heathkit has been a subsidiary of Daystrom, Schlumberger, and Zenith and has been independent several times. Really: Unless you’re an industry historian, it doesn’t matter. Here’s the bottom line: Heath Company runs all Heathkit operations today. High-quality kits, educational systems and instructional products always have been a major line of Heathkit’s business, and we remain committed to education and the joy of building and learning as an important Heathkit value and contribution."
Clickhere for more info.
My Heathkit story: During the 1960s and 1970s, I built several pieces of Heathkit gear including a tube-based oscilloscope with recurrent sweep, transistorized oscilloscope with triggered sweep, FETVOM, portable utility VOM, transistor tester, low-voltage dc power supply, audio sine-square signal generator, RF signal generator, microwave oven, stereo receiver, and a futuristic digital clock with those beautiful orange Panaplex 7-segment displays. These kits helped shape my subsequent career as a design engineer. Twenty years later, just before Heath discontinued its line of kits in the early 1990s, I built one final Heathkit with my young daughter: a dragonfly that flapped its wings with a battery-powered piezoelectric motor.
Do you have Heathkit memories to share? Please post them below in the comments.
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I was talking to a friend just a few minutes before I commenced this column. We will call my friend Joe (because that’s his name). Joe has strong views on this topic. Joe is less than happy. Joe says he’s spent the past week trying to decipher documentation that was obviously written by multiple people who are (a) extremely knowledgeable and technical, but who (b) have no clue when it comes to understanding their audience and creating documentation that is, in fact, useful.
Apart from the sheer size of the document in question, one clue that multiple contributors were involved is that every aspect of style (including titling and numbering) vary throughout this ~1,200-page behemoth. Just to add to the fun and frivolity, when it comes to even simple things like the bits forming a byte, some of the contributors number them from 0 to 7, while others number them from 1 to 8. The authors often mix decimal and hexadecimal numbers without any indication as to the base. And no one specifies how they store and transmit multi-byte values (i.e., as big- or little-endian).
Joe says another huge inconvenience is that the author of one section will refer the reader to another section (e.g., "See Chapter 7") without specifying the sub-section. This may be because different people were involved in the creation of each section, and "section X" wasn’t ready while "section Y" was being written (and vice versa, apparently). Joe compares this to a BASIC program full of GOTO statements without any associated line numbers. And things only go downhill from there. As we ended our call, I could hear Joe muttering, "I hate them... I hate them all" (I don’t think he was joking).
Trying to wrap one’s brain around reams of arcane documentation... we’ve all been there (Source: Leonardo.ai)
As an aside (you knew one was coming), having been exposed to technical documentation from multiple sources over the years, I can now take a stab at the country of origin with some degree of accuracy. For example, there’s a noticeable difference between documentation that started life in German and was subsequently translated into English, as compared to documentation that began life in Japanese, was translated into German (there are lots of German-Japanese collaborations), and was then translated into English.
Also, it rarely takes me long to identify documentation that originated in Israel because such works almost invariably have a Shakespearian feel to them. Imagine Patrick Stewart (who starred as the character Captain Jean-Luc Picardin Star Trek, the Next Generation) reciting in deep, rotund tones, "But where are the variables, you ask?" And then immediately replying to himself theatrically, "Why, the variables are over here!" But we digress...
The reason for my waffling is that I was just chatting with Adam Tilton, who is the Co-founder and CEO at Driver.ai
The company’s claim to fame is that they’ve developed an AI that can generate high-quality documentation from disparate sources. Also, it can read, understand, and explain low-quality documentation from incongruent creators.
Although we are only now hearing about this company, this isn’t something that began with a couple of guys and gals in a garage just a few weeks ago. In fact, this business has been around for a while. They’ve been focusing on customer acquisition, and it’s only recently that they’ve come out of stealth mode.
This all started when Adam and his co-founders were working on a problem of their own. This involved an extremely complex piece of lab equipment. To interact with the equipment, they had to go through an API that was written in Telnet. The documentation for the API was a very dense PDF that didn’t give many clues as to how to use the API to drive the machine. As Adam says, "It was just bits and bobs that totally neglected to explain how varying one thing could disturb another."
In addition to this hard-to-use PDF, Adam had some example script code which, in his words, "was written in MATLAB with zero comments."
I noted that the only worse thing than having code with no comments was having code laden with comments, but where those comments had not kept pace with evolutions (additions, subtractions, and modifications) in the code.
Adam replied that the only thing worse than no documentation at all is incorrect documentation. He says if you don’t believe this, just go look at the forums on semiconductor websites. But, once again, we digress...
At that time, Adam was using large language models (LLMs) for all sorts of things (think "ChatGPT" to provide a point of reference). This was when he and his co-founders said to themselves, "Hey, how about we feed everything we’ve got into an LLM?"
This essentially allowed them to say to the LLM, "I need to enable an API. Here’s the documentation on the API. Here’s some example code. Here’s the setup of what we’re trying to accomplish. How should we go about doing this? Can you explain to us, in commented Python, what we should do?" Well, you can only imagine their surprise and delight to discover that this worked extremely well, and thus was Driver born.
As Adam told me, "As an engineer, over the course of my career, I have had to learn how to work with all manner of different things. At one company, we had more than 4,000 internal applications. For every project, I had to go and figure out some proprietary system built by some team whose members were long gone leaving only their working code." I know how he felt.
In fact, there are two aspects to all of this. The first targets the people creating components and/or technologies and/or products. The second targets the people who are using those components and/or technologies and/or products.
Now I come to think about it, there are even more layers to this onion (which may explain why thinking about it is making my eyes water).
For the purposes of these discussions, let’s focus our attentions on the following groups: the people who create electronic components, the people who use those components to build products, and the people who end up using those products.
Example documentation created by Driver (Source: Driver.ai)
Suppose we have a bunch of field application engineers (FAEs) who work for a semiconductor company that’s about to launch a new microcontroller unit (MCU). In addition to documenting the MCU itself, the company will want the FAEs to create and document a bunch of application examples showing how to leverage this device. "Here’s how to enable secure boot," or "Here’s how to build an activity tracker," or.... So, the FAEs create these example code applications, after which they write the quick-start guide and the onboarding guide and some example overviews and...
Hold onto your hat because—in addition to writing all the aforementioned documentation—Driver can also generate the demonstration applications themselves (take a moment to think about this).
Now, imagine that a development team wishes to use this MCU and a bunch of other components (sensors, actuators, displays...) to create a product. Driver can read all the documentation associated with all the devices and then answer questions from the engineers designing the hardware and the developers creating the firmware and application software.
This includes eliminating tedious activities, like setup. Driver can say, "Here are the libraries you need to run this" and "Here are the installation instructions for how to get going" and "Here’s the makefile with its configuration variables and the different options you can choose" and... you get the idea.
But we’re not done because, once this new product has been created, it will require its own documentation and its own application examples. Obviously, the hardware and software teams would LOVE to write all this themselves, but I bet it wouldn’t be too hard to persuade them to let Driver do it for them.
Adam showed me examples of all this happening in real-time, and it took my breath away. We truly do live in interesting times. What say you? Do you have any thoughts you’d care to share on anything you’ve read here?
]]>Chas Gilmore: In 1977, the VP that had been running the instrumentation part of Heath for a year and a half to two years moved to EMR Telemetry [owned by Schlumberger, like Heath Company] and his Vice President of engineering got a promotion to another group. Then he called me up and said, "I’d like you down here for an interview."
By then, we were knee deep in introducing the Heathkit computer line: the H8 and all its family. And there are a lot of interesting stories around that one. But we had introduced it, and he called me up and said, "Would you be interested in being the head of engineering here?" EMR had a 150-person engineering department. He said, "We’re gonna take that department to about 350 people, fast. Can you do it?"
I said, "Yeah, I’ll come down and have a chat with you." And because EMR Telemetry was located in Sarasota, Florida, I said, "Okay, that sounds interesting. By the way, my wife, I want her to come along."
"Oh," he said, "No, this is gonna take forever. You don’t need to bring her." I said that I’d like to bring her. So, we went down on a Thursday, I guess. Had the interview on Friday. Spent the weekend down there getting shown around. Came back to Heath. Dove into things. The following Friday, they said, "You got the job. We want you down here Monday." At that point in time, I said to myself, "Man, am I glad that they brought Polly along, because there wasn’t a prayer we were moving from Saint Joe, Michigan to Sarasota, Florida, without her even seeing it."
Steve Leibson: Right.
Chas Gilmore: And Schlumberger was a little bit in the mode of saying, "Just tell her she’s coming."
Steve Leibson: Oil-field mentality.
Chas Gilmore: And French mentality
So, with that I wound up in Sarasota as the head of engineering for EMR Telemetry. That was late 1977.
About 1981, maybe 1982, I split with them. They brought in a new general manager, and he and I did not get along. Later I left EMR and I got the idea, "Let’s put together a real time software company." And that’s what we did for the next three, four, or five years.
Then, I got a call. "Would you like to come back to Heath?" That first time, the question was, "Would you like to come back as VP of engineering?" And I thought, "No. I’ve got a business. We’re going pretty well." Then Heath came back and said, "Well, we’ll make it VP of all product development engineering, marketing, and sales. The works." I said, "Okay." I sold my company, and that’s when I went back to Heath.
By then Heath had been acquired by Zenith and they were up to their necks in trying to get computers cranked out.
Steve Leibson: Right.
Chas Gilmore: And...
Steve Leibson: There’s quite a disconnect between Zenith computers and the Heathkit computers, though.
Chas Gilmore: Well, yeah. Zenith’s objective was making fabricated computers, right?
Steve Leibson: PCs basically.
Chas Gilmore: Exactly, and at Heathkit, we had done, of course, the H8, and the H11, and the H18, but they were not PC compatible. And Zenith Data Systems really cranked into the compatibles. And by the time I got back there in ’83, computer sales were up to about 285ドル million (and they were all PC compatibles), if I remember, and the first year...
Chas Gilmore: Oh, good! So! I left shortly after all this computer stuff rolled out.
Steve Leibson: And then you came back in ‘83, ‘84.
Chas Gilmore: ‘83, yeah.
Steve Leibson: And what was the state at that point? Computers were dominant. The Heath part of the computer business was nearly 30ドル million.
Chas Gilmore: Yes. What had been Heath Computer Systems, the Heath name for the assembled – i.e. non-kit computers – w as changed to Zenith Data Systems. And it was about 285ドル million a year at that point and growing like a weed with a very substantial engineering department.
And as an interesting side note – at that point in time, Zenith was being run by a guy by the name of Jerry Pearlman. He had worked for a fellow by the name of McNamara in the automotive industry. Jerry was a financial wizard.
In 1978 or maybe 1980, when I was still at EMR at the time, Heath had, for I think the 13th or 14th time, a union vote. And that time, the union won. And then the story that I got, I wasn’t there at the time, but I knew a lot of people there and I think I got the story fairly clearly, was that at that point, within a few days, somebody, one very high-powered VP In Schlumberger, called up Dave Nurse and said, "There’s a fellow by the name of Jerry Pearlman at Zenith coming over to talk to you. We’re selling the company to him. We do not have unions in Schlumberger. End of story."
Pearlman was interested because he was smart enough to see that this personal computer stuff was really going to go places. He definitely saw that. He was having trouble with the TV business. It was bleeding, and it was close to a billion-dollar business, but bleeding like a stuck pig. Really rough. The difficulty was that – this is a side note – even when we got the computer line up to about a billion [dollars annually], it was also bleeding. When somebody finally started measuring it, because for a while the answer was, this was Pearlman’s baby. Don’t bother measuring it. Just put the money in that it keeps being called for. We’re building this business.
And, not unlike a lot of personal computer businesses, we had a lot of financial troubles. We grew too fast, and managing companies that are growing that rapidly, it was a very tough deal.
Steve Leibson: Well, and you had 200 companies competing for 2% of the market.
Chas Gilmore: Oh, yeah, yeah. All kinds of innovations and people working. Well, then, we didn’t have a lot of people writing application software at the time. There were a lot of headaches.
When I came back to take over the Heath products, all of the Heath product development stuff, the other assignment that I got was to sit on the Zenith Data Systems Product Development Committee, because originally it was conceived because Heath was making kits out of the Zenith Systems computers, which was a kind of a "we’re kit-izing" a built, an assembled product. They certainly were not designed as kits.
Steve Leibson: Which is the opposite of the instruments.
Chas Gilmore: Oh, yes, absolutely. So, I did get quite a good perspective on the computer side of the business from sitting in that committee and becoming pretty good friends with, especially, the guy that was heading up Zenith Data Systems.
Backing up a little bit – somewhere in the mid-seventies, or maybe the earlier seventies, we introduced something like 300 new products in a year. By the time I got back there in ’84, we were down to like 50 because our engineering resources were being drained heavily, just for computers.
But we weren’t getting any of the computers out of it, you know, we – well, when the computer design was all done, then it was, "Okay. See if you can make a kit out of this," and a lot of the time, it was nothing more than just assemble a frame and stick some pre-built boards in.
Steve Leibson: Because that’s what you do to design for manufacturing.
Chas Gilmore: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, we had gone to, you know, full pick-and-place lines and automated testing. We have...
Steve Leibson: That’s what I believe is one of the major things that happened to the kit business: as soon as we got into surface mount, you could no longer manually assemble these things.
Chas Gilmore: Well, I beg to differ with you. There are quite a number of good kits on the market using surface mount components. In fact, I just built one about a year ago. A very, very nice, very low noise, 2-meter preamplifier. Now, the guy that designed it, an Australian fellow, was very nice, and he used 1206 parts. And I’ve worked it down to about a 603, and that’s the end of it. No way the typical electronic hobbyist can do a 402, or even a 102. You have to be careful. If you sneeze, you’ve got parts everywhere. And they’re not marked. And yeah, there were terrible problems for the traditional Heathkit business. One significant problem was the pervasiveness of electronic products for the consumer.
You know, in 1968, when somebody was visiting a Heath customer, and he – the market for electronic kits was very nearly 100% male – had a party at his house, and he was able to point at his television and say, "I built that." Whoa! Are you something special! And you’ve got a color TV. Well, by the time you got to even 1978, everybody had a color TV, and – I can’t quite remember what the timing was – maybe they had a VCR. So, a lot of the pizazz went out of being a kit builder.
As one of my bosses once said, "Yeah, you know the thrill of having something that you built and then turn it on, and it worked. Wow! That was something." And we had moved to where the answer was, you go to Kmart, and you get ticked off if you buy something and it doesn’t have batteries in it so that you can play it on the way home. You know, you needed that immediacy.
Then, when personal computers came around, the software became a very intriguing element for a lot of the people who would have normally gone over to building kit hardware. That really reduced the number of people who got joy from building a product. Even well into the eighties. I mean, we were still doing kits with a lot of through-hole components, etc. But one of the things that did go away was the ability to save a lot of money by buying the product. You know, back again during the heyday of the kits, the sixties, early seventies, we could pretty safely say you could save 25% or 30% on an equivalent product.
Steve Leibson: Right, that goes all the way back to the original oscilloscope.
Chas Gilmore: Sure 40ドル.
Steve Leibson: Oscilloscope.
Chas Gilmore: Well, and up until the late sixties or so, your typical manufactured electronic product had just about an equal amount of parts cost and labor cost. By the time you got to the end of the 1970s, only 4% or 5% of the total cost to manufacture was in labor, and the rest of it was parts. Well, bang! You just took all the savings out of building a kit. So, from the labor-saving standpoint, only a few products like linear amplifiers for the ham line (which are very labor intensive) really offered savings in kit form.
Steve Leibson: Right.
Chas Gilmore: Not only that, but we had some extra cost which was that you had to put all these parts in the individual bags, etc. Now towards the end, what we did, for example, is that we would use tape machines and put the leaded components on tapes as though they were going into an automated insertion. But the resistors, caps, and all, were there in the order in which you put them into the board. So, among other things, you didn’t have to read the color codes, which were going to hell in a handbasket, and the markings on the components, like capacitors, sometimes they were blurry because, hey, nobody needed them for assembly anymore. So there were a lot of factors that led to the demise of building kits. And yes, the automation part of electronics product assembly was part of the problem. Big time. Because again, you know, if you want to build a big hi-fi receiver, all of a sudden, the kit hi-fi was not an economical buy anymore. You didn’t go to these things for economics.
Now, in the ham radio world, you had a lot of people who were still awfully interested in building their own transmitter or their own receiver.
Steve Leibson: Right, that goes beyond economics, though.
Chas Gilmore: Yes, it does very definitely. Whereas you had a lot less of that with the audio. Yes, there are certainly audiophiles who wanted to say, "I handcrafted this amplifier." But a lot of the audiophiles, they turned to Heath, "A," because they were damn good products, and "B," because they could save a lot of money with respect to the other stuff that was on the market. And that latter element had disappeared.
I think had a lot of those other factors not come into play, Heath could have continued with kits, certainly with the larger surface mount devices. But as I said, you can’t compete with the components in an iPhone. It just ain’t gonna happen. In some of the niche markets you could compete, but you’re not going to do the 30% savings anymore. It’s more of the pride of "I built my own unit." The other element for Heath was that the kit business was never really suited to be part of a large corporation.
Steve Leibson: And the educational aspect.
Chas Gilmore: Yeah, the educational aspect and the pride of authorship if you will.
So, during the eighties, well, we started out OK, but when I got there, it was one of those, after you take the job and you begin looking around for about 6 months, you say, "Whoa, this thing’s in a lot bigger hole than I ever thought."
Steve Leibson: Right.
Chas Gilmore: From a financial standpoint. Because there were some funny financials going on, and a tremendous amount of the talent had been grabbed and moved elsewhere, and, yes, the electronics market had changed as well.
So, we ventured off. For example, one of the groups that got started when I was there developed passive infrared lighting and wireless doorbells. We built that up into a 75ドル million business. But that was all assembled. It’s all sold through big box stores, and we were assembling in China. So, we had that, and the Heathkit Educational Systems, which were selling both to individuals who just wanted to learn electronics and very heavily into the tech schools. That was a fairly reasonable business. Nothing wild, but it was a reasonable business, and it had a positive bottom line. And that business carried on well beyond after I left Heath in the mid-nineties, I guess. Mid-nineties, maybe even late nineties.
But what happened was the electronic trade school business was going downhill, because repair became module replacement. You don’t need to know Ohm’s law. You don’t need to understand how flip-flops work, or what an op amp is, or anything of that nature. So that business declined.
Then the other transition that happened was in 1988, I believe. Groupe Bull, which was the French government-owned computer business, acquired Zenith Data Systems. At that stage of the game, Zenith was in financial deep doo doo, because they had both the computer business and the TV business, both losing money. And Pearlman tried like hell to sell the TV business. Nobody wanted to buy it, but Groupe Bull came along and said, we’re going to get into the personal computer business, and we’ll buy your little business, which at that point was a billion dollars.
And one of the nice things about Groupe Bull was the fact that they were at the time about 2 billion dollars, I think, and losing 200 million a year. However, it’s owned by the Republic of France, so once a year, they’d go back to the Republic of France and say, "Hmm! We have a 200ドル million deficit on our balance sheet," and the French government would say, "Okay, here’s 200ドル million. Now, you’re even. Keep going," because they wanted the country to have their own businesses.
Steve Leibson: Right.
Chas Gilmore: How did they wind up with Heath Company? Well, that was an accident. When they bought Zenith Data Systems, Heath went along with it, probably mostly because we were co-located in the same facilities. The French didn’t understand this business one little bit. The French don’t get their hands dirty, doing things like building kits.
Steve Leibson: I see.
Chas Gilmore: It’s interesting. Both the French and the Germans exhibit that characteristic (at least for the level of consumers who can afford those products.) We did have, through the late sixties and well into the seventies, a plant in England making kits and Europeanizing them, including, you know, translating manuals into French, German, Spanish, and Italian, etc.
Anyway, Let’s see, we’ve...
Steve Leibson: Well, I think we’ve reached the end of your career at Heath, and it’s time for you to start some more companies.
Chas Gilmore: Yeah. Well, I left Heath in 1993 or 1994. Came here in January of ’94, and that was a turnaround job. There was a...
Steve Leibson: Where’s here?
Chas Gilmore: Akron, Ohio.
Steve Leibson: Okay.
Chas Gilmore: And there was a company here. Just a quick bit of background on it. This company that’s making industrial X-ray inspection equipment and machine vision apparatus mainly aimed at the container industry. It was part of a group of seven companies that had been part of Ball, the glass jar manufacturing company.
Steve Leibson: Right, and also Ball Aerospace.
Chas Gilmore: Also Ball Aerospace, indeed! And Ball decided that there was a collection of these companies that had been acquired kind of in the… "Well, we’re dabbling in this. So let’s buy this company." So, for example, they bought a company that made zinc blanks for pennies. I’m trying to think what the reason was that they bought that company, but there was something to do with the jars, and then you use zinc seals on things. There was a company that rolled sheet metal and printed it. And they made up this group of seven companies. About 1994 or so, Ball said, "Now we’re spinning them off."
This was when business got into the "we have to focus on core" mode. So, once they got it spun off, and somebody took a look at this operation in Akron, which was in the industrial X-ray and machine vision business, and said, "It doesn’t look like it’s making money." So let’s let go of the guy that’s running the company." It was the guy that had started it many years before, and it had been acquired. It was four acquisitions that were merged together, and they retired him, and I came in to do a turnaround.
We got it turned around. The company name was Altrista, which owned these seven companies. And then they looked at that and Altrista said, "Wait a minute, this company LumenX, up in Akron, that’s the only capital equipment company we’ve got. Everybody else is making product that goes into some other company’s product." There were a couple of plastic molding injection companies, etc. So, they decided that the right thing to do was to sell it off, and, if they had to, they’d sell it in pieces. The logical split was the X-ray and the machine vision parts.
Somewhere along the line there. I started working with some folks at Phillips in Hamburg, Germany, who also had the Phillips industrial X-ray business, and Phillips didn’t like that. They were into medical X-ray. So, Altrista sold off the machine vision part, which I thought was a mistake, because it was definitely up and coming, and there was a lot more needed, and we were beginning to incorporate it in parts of the X-ray for inspecting tires, because one of the X-ray things – Akron, Ohio – tires. Oh, yeah, we were doing that.
So, we got together with some guys at Phillips and brought in somebody else from a company in Denmark called Andrex, and we pulled that all together, found venture capital, and formed a company called XYLON, named by the German group. They were the bigger of the group.
Anyway, I then spent three years, I guess, with that group heading up the US operations. They kept insisting that, you know, we can build this stuff in Germany cheaper than you can make it in the States. And I kept saying, "You’re crazy, you know. I’ve got a burdened manufacturing rate of 37ドル an hour, and you’ve got a burdened rate of 75ドル."
Steve Leibson: That explains why BMWs are so much cheaper than Fords.
Chas Gilmore: Yes. So finally, because the venture cap firm was German, that was one where I said, "No, guys, I’m not in. Bye. We’re splitting the company. I’ll take my buyout option and bid you farewell."
I started doing a small amount of private consulting at that point. And then, not long after, a guy that had worked with me as Vice President of sales and marketing at LumenX, and another guy who was Director of Customer Service – interesting character, who was a BSE and a JD – the three of us bought a little company up in Cleveland – PPM – which was the one that that had been started by a Case Western graduate back in 1960. So, that was how I got into that. And then, in 2008, we had a bit of a tragedy. The younger of the three of us, the EE lawyer, who was kind of running the manufacturing side of the business, died.
I really stuck to the strategic marketing and technology, and the third guy really did sales. We were doing quite well. The company had been losing money. We got it turned around. We were going, and the young fella suddenly died in his fifties. Cliff and I, as the remaining two partners said, "Heck, that was our retirement plan. Dale was going to take it. So, we started shopping around for an alternative, and the alternative that worked out best was that we licensed our products to two other companies. They paid us in sales royalties, which meant they didn’t have to have a big upfront cash flow, and we didn’t get massive taxes, as we didn’t get a massive bundle of cash right up front.
Steve Leibson: Right.
Chas Gilmore: These were five- and ten-year agreements, and we had consulting along with it, etc. And finally, we started winding things down in 2010, and we formally closed the company in 2020. Since then, I’ve been doing some consulting. I’m busier than hell.
Do you have Heathkit memories to share? Please post them below in the comments.
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Arrrggghhh. How did I miss that? How could I not have used "Brain-Boggling Neuromorphic Brain Chips"? There was much gnashing of teeth and rending of garb that day, let me tell you.
The articles in question (see Part 1 and Part 2) were focused on the folks at brainchip, whose claim to fame is to be the world’s first commercial producer of neuromorphic IP.
Before we plunge headfirst into the fray with gusto and abandon (and aplomb, of course), let’s first remind ourselves as to what we mean by the "neuromorphic" moniker. Also, as part of setting the scene, let’s remind ourselves that we are focusing our attentions on implementing artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) tasks at the extreme edge of the internet. For example, creating intelligent sensors at the point where the "internet rubber" meets the "real-world road."
Regular artificial neural networks (ANNs) are typically implemented using a humongous quantity of multiply-accumulate (MAC) operations. These are typically used to realize things like convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for working with images and videos, deep neural networks (DNNs) for working with general data, and recurrent neural networks (RNNs) for working with sequential (time-series) data.
When it comes to implementing these types of ANN for use at the extreme edge, the least efficient option is to use a regular microcontroller unit (MCU). The next step up is to use a digital signal processor (DSP), which can be simplistically thought of as being an MCU augmented with MAC functionality. One more step up the ladder takes us to an MCU augmented with a neural processing unit (NPU). For simplicity, we can visualize the NPU as being implemented as a huge array of MACs. In this case, the NPU cannot run in standalone mode—instead, it needs the MCU to be running to manage everything, feed it data, and action any results.
Furthermore, regular NPUs are designed to accelerate traditional ANNs, and they rely on conventional digital computing paradigms and synchronized operations. These NPUs process data in a batch mode, performing matrix computations (e.g., matrix multiplication) on large datasets, which can be resource-intensive.
By comparison, "neuromorphic” refers to a type of computing architecture that’s inspired by the structure and functioning of the human brain. It seeks to emulate neural systems by mimicking the way biological neurons and synapses communicate and process information. These systems focus on event-based, asynchronous processing that mimics how neurons fire.
Neuromorphic networks are often referred to as spiking neural networks (SNNs) because they model neural behavior using "spikes" to convey information. Since they perform processing only when changes occur in their input, SNNs dramatically reduce power consumption and latency.
"What about sparsity?" I hear you cry. That’s a good question. What prompted you to ask it? Could it be that you’ve been reading my earlier columns? One problem with regular ANNs is that they tend to process everything, even things that aren’t worth processing. If you are multiplying two numbers together and one is 0, for example, then you already know that the answer will be 0. In the context of AI/ML inferencing, a 0 will have no effect on the result (and a very low value will have minimal effect on the result). The idea behind sparsity is to weed out any unnecessary operations.
In fact, there are three kinds of sparsity. The first is related to the coefficients (weights) used by the network. A preprocessor can be used to root through the network, detecting any low value weights (whose effect will be insignificant), setting them to 0, and then pruning any 0 elements from the network. The second type of sparsity is similar, but it relates to the activation functions. Once again, these can be pruned by a preprocessor.
The third type of sparsity is data sparsity. Think 0s being fed into the ANN, which blindly computes these nonsensical values (silly ANN). Since the real-world data being fed into the networkis being generated in real-time “on the fly,” data sparsity isn’t something that can be handled by a preprocessor.
How sparse can data be? Well, this depends on the application, but data can be pretty darned sparse, let me tell you. Think of a camera pointing at a door in a wall. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that, in many cases, nothing was happening 99% of the time. Suppose the camera is running at 30 frames per second (fps). A typical CNN will process every pixel in every frame in every second. That’s a lot of computation being performed, and a lot of energy being consumed, to no avail.
By comparison, a neuromorphic NPU is event-based, which means it does something (on the processing front) only when there’s something to be done. To put this another way, while regular NPUs can handle only one or both weight and activation types of sparsity, neuromorphic NPUs can support all three types, thereby dropping their power consumption to the floor.
The reason I’m bubbling over with all this info is that I was just chatting with Steve Brightfield, who is the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) atbrainchip. The folks at brainchip are in the business of providing digital neuromorphic processor IP in the form of register transfer level (RTL) that ASIC, ASSP, and SoC developers can incorporate into their designs.
In my previous columns, I waxed eloquently about brainchip’s Akida fabric, which mimics the working of the human brain to analyze only essential sensor inputs at the point of acquisition, "processing data with unparalleled performance, precision, and reduced power consumption," as the chaps and chapesses at brainchip will modestly inform anyone who cannot get out of the way fast enough.
Well, Steve was brimming over with enthusiasm to tell me all about their new Akida Pico ultra-low-power IP core. Since this operates in the microwatt (μW) to milliwatt (mW) range, Akida Pico empowers devices at the extreme edge to perform at their best without sacrificing battery life.
Even better, the Akida Pico can either operate in standalone mode or it can serve as the co-processor to a higher-level processor. In standalone mode, the Akida Pico can operate independently, allowing devices to process audio and vital sign data with minimal power consumption. This is ideal for smart medical devices that monitor vital signs continuously or voice-activated systems that need to respond instantly. By comparison, when used as a co-processor, the Akida Pico can offload demanding AI tasks from the higher-level processor, thereby ensuring that applications run efficiently while conserving energy. This really is the ultimate always-on wake-up core.
Example use cases include medical vitals monitoring and alarms, speech wake-up words for automatic speech recognition (ASR) start-up, and audio noise reduction for outdoor/noisy environments for hearing aids, earbuds, smartphones, and virtual reality/augmented reality (VR/AR) headsets.
How big is this IP? Well, a base configuration without memory will require 150K logic gates and occupy 0.12mm2 die area at a 22nm process. Adding 50KB of SRAM will boost this to 0.18mm2 of die area at a 22nm process. I mean to say, "Seriously?" Less than a fifth of a square millimeter for always on AI that consumes only microwatts of power? Give me strength!
Do you want to hear something really exciting? You do? Well, do you remember my column, Look at Something, Ask a Question, Hear an Answer: Welcome to the Future? In that column, I discussed how the folks at Zinn Labs had developed an event-based gaze-tracking system for AI-enabled smart frames and mixed-reality systems. As a reminder, look at this video:
As we see (no pun intended), the user looks at something, asks a spoken question, and receives a spoken answer. This system features the GenX320 metavision sensor from Prophesee.
Why do we care about this? Well, the thing is that this sensor is event-based. Steve from brainchip was chatting with the guys and gals at Prophesee. They told him that they typically need to take the event-based data coming out of their camera and convert it into a frame-based format to be fed to a CNN.
Think about it. The chaps and chapesses at brainchip typically need to take frame-based data and convert it into events that can be fed to their Akida fabric.
So, rather than going event-based data (from the camera) to frame-based data, and then frame-based data to event-based data (to the Akida processor), the folks from Prophesee and brainchip can simply feed the event-based data from the camera directly to the event-based Akida processor, thereby cutting latency and power consumption to a minimum.
My head is still buzzing with ideas pertaining to the applications of—and the implications associated with—Akida’s neuromorphic fabric. What say you? Do you have any thoughts you’d care to share?
]]>In the early part of the interview, Gilmore described meeting and working with Lou Frenzel at Heath. Frenzel wrote about microprocessors and microcomputers for decades in numerous books and publications. Together, Gilmore and Fenzel were largely responsible for getting Heath into the microcomputer kit business.
Chas Gilmore: Did you know Lou?
Steve Leibson: We corresponded. I don’t think we ever met face to face.
Chas Gilmore: Okay. Well, as you may have guessed from that, Lou and I were very good friends for about 50 years.
Steve Leibson: Oh, wow!
Chas Gilmore: You know he just died. January 2023. He had Parkinson’s.
Steve Leibson: Oh!
Chas Gilmore: And in the last year or 2 it really began to catch up with him.
Steve Leibson: Yeah.
Chas Gilmore: Very sad. He was a wonderful person. A prolific writer, as you, I’m sure, are very aware.
Steve Leibson: Oh yes!
Chas Gilmore: I think, some 30 books, or something of that nature, plus there must be thousands of articles.
Steve Leibson: Yes.
Chas Gilmore: You guys who do professional writing really can crank them out. I’ve not...
Steve Leibson: Pays the bills.
Chas Gilmore: Yes, I’ve got about five or six books to my name, but nowhere near that prolific.
Steve Leibson: Well, I think I have five or six books, too.
Chas Gilmore: Yeah, Lou was a real influence on getting me to write the first book, which was compiled from a series of articles I did for Radio-Electronics magazine. The book was on basic electronic instruments and published by TAB Books. Later there were books on electronic instruments and microprocessors published by McGraw-Hill. Well, the first thing that happened was the editor at Radio-Electronics – Hugo Gernsback – asked me, "Do you want to keep the book rights?"
"Huh! What’s this?" I thought.
Steve Leibson: The first time you’re asked that, you never know the answer.
Chas Gilmore: Well, something in me said, "Yeah, sure." And then, I went and consulted with Lou, because we had just become friends. He had just come to Heath. I was probably five years into Heath at that point, and…
Steve Leibson: So, he’d been at Heath.
Chas Gilmore: Oh, yes! Lou was the brains behind the Heath Educational Systems product line. He came to Heath in the early seventies and started writing the courses, pulling together a department. He had left McGraw-Hill’s Educational division, and, very shortly, we wound up with a whole additional department devoted to Heathkit Educational Systems. It was all the trainers, the manuals, the coursework that went with it. Later, I was the technical guy, and he was the marketing guy behind the Heath personal computer line.
Later in the interview, Gilmore discussed the development of Heath’s early microcomputer kit products:
Chas Gilmore: We introduced the H8 in August of 1977 at the first annual PC Show in Atlantic City. We closed that year at 7ドル to 8ドル million in PC-related product. We started development on that, well, that backs up to Lou Frenzel and me. Both of us were just very interested in computer-related products. I’d gotten quite interested in microprocessors at that stage of the game. In fact, I had written one book on it, and Lou had been a computer hobbyist from way, way back. In the scientific instruments group, we had been using PDL-8Ls. DEC introduced those computers when they needed a minicomputer under 10,000ドル. They beat that price by a dollar.
But oh, wow! I mean the things that we could do with it, controlling instruments. And this was just before we got rid of the spectroscopy line. You could really control that spectrophotometer and do a ton of control and measurement. So, Lou and I got to talking about, "Oh, man, you know, we could really begin to do some Heathkit computers."
We went to the Executive Product Development Committee, the XPDC. And I can explain that structure to you if you’d like. It was a fairly unique new product development process, but really neat and worked well. We went to the XPDC and said we’d like to do a computer, and we proposed the H8. We got the usual response: "What the hell is somebody gonna do with a computer? Balance a checkbook?"
And it was not going to be a low-cost development project.
Finally, the Executive Product Development Committee, which had everybody, including the president of the company and all his direct reports, heads of various and sundry departments in it, said, "Okay. You can do it." And normally Dave Nurse, who was the President, was very quiet at best. He’d just nod and the guy who was in charge of the product planning group would say, "Okay, it’s approved. You can go ahead," and we’d approve so much engineering, etc.
Normally, all that Mr. Nurse would do was just nod. This time, he said, "Okay, but till that’s on the market and selling at forecast, I don’t want to hear of one more computer-related product."
Steve Leibson: One and only one.
Chas Gilmore: One and only one. It’s going to be the H8. By the time we introduced it a year and a half later, we had the H8. We had the H-11, which was a kit of a DEC PDP-11 computer.
Heathkit H8 Microcomputer. Image credit: Computer History Museum
Steve Leibson: Right.
Chas Gilmore: We had the H-10 paper tape reader/punch. We had a printer. We had a terminal. And we had a number of other peripherals including some disk drives in development.
What helped to wake them up was that 1975 article in Radio-Electronics on the Altair.
Steve Leibson: Yeah, that was Popular Electronics.
Chas Gilmore: That was Popular Electronics. Yes, okay.
Steve Leibson: Yeah. The MITS Altair 8800.
The Heath Company introduced the Heathkit H8 microcomputer and H9 CRT terminal in 1977. Image credit: Marcin Wichary
Chas Gilmore: Yep, well it snowballed after that. We did go back, and we did get further permission, and, like I said, by the time we got to introduction, in August of ’77, we had several computer products. It took some time, because the Heathkit process is a slow one.
A company with a device like a MITS Altair can run circles around an organization like Heath with a new design from a development time standpoint. At the time, we were probably about 180 people in engineering, of which half were in design engineering and design engineering support, and the other half was in the manual department, which wrote the assembly manuals.
Oh! And we went through a very exhaustive process of proofing the kit to make sure that it was going to go together and work, etc. Which was above and beyond the technical proof that the product would work and meet specs, etc.
So, by the time we introduced the H8, there were a number of other personal computer products on the market. And so, we introduced in August, and we had basically September through December sales that came out to be in the seven or eight million dollar area for that few months of the year, and…
Steve Leibson: This was ‘77.
Chas Gilmore: This was ‘77. And to put it in perspective, I think the best-selling product line at Heathkit at the time was the electronic instruments, doing about 18ドル million a year. Amateur radio was probably 12ドル million to 14ドル million. Audio and TV would vie for third and fourth place depending on what was the latest product that popped out, and then the others were scattered at a lower level. The total company sales about that time were in the 65ドル or 71ドル million range. Something of that nature.
I left Heath shortly after all this computer stuff rolled out.
Part 4 of this article series continues with Gilmore’s return to Heath and the eventual demise of the company’s kit business.
Do you have Heathkit memories to share? Please post them below in the comments.
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As an aside, one of the earliest and most famous steam-powered railways to carry passengers was the Stockton and Darlington Railway (S&DR) in England, and the first such occurrence took place on 27 September 1825. Just a few years later, in 1830, the Liverpool and Manchester Railway opened, also in England. This line was a major milestone in railway history as it was the first fully intercity passenger railway with scheduled service.
As strange as it may seem to us today, those early railway passengers were genuinely afraid that high speeds would make it impossible to breathe. People worried that the human body couldn’t handle speeds over 30 mph, fearing they’d be unable to draw in air fast enough or that they might even suffer physical harm. There was also a concern about what open-air travel at those speeds might do to people’s eyes and other senses.
The reason I mention this here is that, when I was coming up, clock frequencies of a few hundred kilohertz were considered to be pretty darned exciting. I remember working on a project in the very early 1980s whose motherboard was to be driven by a clock running at... wait for it... wait for it... one megahertz! (I’ll pause for a moment to let the gasps of astonishment die down). I also remember that—when the lead engineer reached out to flip the power switch for the first time—we all took deep breaths and leaned back, "just in case."
I think we subconsciously believed we were pushing the bounds of what was possible. We didn’t have a clue. In the case of shrinking semiconductor process nodes, as each new node came online, the naysayers proclaimed, "this is as low as we can go," and then we went lower. Similarly, every time we increased our clock frequencies, the pessimistic prophets of doom and despondency pronounced, "this is as high as we can go," and then we went higher.
I’m thinking of things like the ISA bus (8 MHz) in the 1980s and the PCI bus (33-66 MHz) in the 1990s, followed by 100 Mbps (Fast Ethernet) and later 1 Gbps (Gigabit Ethernet) in the 2000s, followed by newer standards like 10 Gbps Ethernet (10GBASE-T) in the 2010s, followed by even more advanced technologies like 25 Gbps, 40 Gbps, and even 100 Gbps over copper in the 2020s (albeit in very controlled environments over very short distances using advanced twisted-pair cables and connectors).
Based on my past experiences, I’m certainly not going to be the one to say, "thus far and no farther," but I also don’t mind saying that going faster and faster over copper is getting harder and harder (and you can quote me on that).
The fact that we need to move more and more data faster and faster with lower and lower latency explains why we are moving to photonics systems and optical interconnect to link our chips, boards, systems, and facilities. All of which goes to explain why I was just chatting with Dr. Armond Hairapetian, who is the Founder and CEO of TeraSignal.
You may be familiar with TeraSignal’s TS8401/02 intelligent 400G (4x100G) PAM-4 modulator drivers, which are the industry’s first CMOS solutions with digital link training and link monitoring for 800G linear pluggable optical (LPO) modules. (The TS8401 and TS8402 are essentially the same die—the only difference is that the 01 has pads and is wire-bonded to the substrate, while the 02 has solder bumps and is attached using a flip-chip technique.)
The primary purpose of our chat was for Dr. Armond to bring me up to date with respect to TeraSignal’s latest development, which is a protocol-agnostic intelligent interconnect for plug-and-play linear optics called TSLink.
Now, the following diagram can be a little confusing for a bear of little brain like your humble narrator, so let’s take things step-by-step. On the left we have an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC), possibly in the form of a system-on-chip (SoC). In addition to processors, hardware accelerators, on-chip memory, and a bunch of other stuff, this little scamp will contain multiple serializer/deserializer (SerDes) transceiver (transmitter (TX) and receiver (RX)) functions. It’s the TX side that’s of interest here.
DSP-based re-timer vs. TSLink-based re-driver (Source: TeraSignal)
Observe that the SerDes TX function includes a digital equalizer and a digital-to-analog converter (DAC). The digital equalizer is used to apply pre-emphasis and/or de-emphasis to compensate for signal degradation over the copper interconnect (pre-emphasis boosts the high-frequency components of the signal to counteract the losses they’ll face over the transmission path; de-emphasis reduces the strength of the lower-frequency components relative to the high-frequency parts, effectively flattening the overall frequency response).
When it comes to converting the electrical signal from the ASIC into an optical signal to the rest of the system, we have two options: either we can use a traditional DSP re-timer, or we can use TeraSignal’s TSLink re-driver. Both of these options are shown on the right of the image above.
It’s important to note that the "Optics" annotations on the extreme right of this image do not represent optical fibers. Instead, they indicate an electrical path to something like a Mach-Zehnder modulator, which will be used to control the amplitude of an optical wave. The re-timer or re-driver functions will be bundled with the Mach-Zehnder modulator and other stuff, all presented as a single optical module whose electrical input comes from the ASIC and whose optical output (feeding a fiber) comes from the Mach-Zehnder modulator.
Bearing all this in mind...
Suppose we start off by visualizing two devices communicating directly with each other over copper interconnect using something like a non-return-to-zero (NRZ) binary code. When the designers decided to move to optical interconnect, they would feed the electrical signal from the ASIC into an optical module.
The traditional approach was to put a DSP re-timer inside the optical module, because this provided a simple way to employ some kind of clock data recovery (CDR) technique to recover the clock, re-time the data, and send this re-timed data on its merry way.
But then the industry started to move away from NRZ and to adopt the PAM-4 (pulse amplitude modulation with 4 levels) modulation scheme. PAM-4 employs four distinct amplitude levels to represent data, thereby allowing it to encode two bits per symbol instead of the traditional single bit supported by NRZ binary signaling.
With PAM-4, you can’t implement a simple CDR scheme. Instead, you must use an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) and a DSP-based clock recovery and re-timer approach, which increases the complexity by orders of magnitude. All this is obvious when you look at the DSP re-timer implementation in the above diagram. Starting with the original digital signal in the ASIC, the traditional path is DAC (in ASIC) to ADC (in re-timer) to DAC (in re-timer) to the optical modulator. Doesn’t this DAC > ADC > DAC path seem a little redundant? (Did I already imply that?)
By comparison, the optical module using the TSLink Re-Driver works directly with the analog signal coming from the ASIC—no additional ADC, DSP, and DAC overhead steps are required or involved.
The actual way TSLink performs its magic is beyond my ability to describe (at least, to describe correctly—I could easily make things up, but that wouldn’t benefit either of us). What I can do is summarize the advantages of TSLink-based optical modules as follows:
Well, color me impressed. What’s not to love? If you want to learn more, feel free to reach out to the folks at TeraSignal, who will be happy to regale you with more nitty-gritty details than you’ll know what to do with. In the meantime, as always, I welcome your comments (especially the nice ones) and questions (especially the easy ones).
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Steve Leibson: You joined Heath in 1966.
Chas Gilmore: I was with the Scientific Instruments group at that time. The structure of the engineering department at that time: there was a vice president of engineering, and reporting to him were, I think, six engineering section managers for amateur radio, television, audio, kit instruments, scientific instruments, and general. General did the model airplane stuff. They did all kinds of things, anything you couldn’t place in the other departments.
At that time, Scientific Instruments was a quite a new spin-off from the old kit instruments group, but the gestation of that group, what drove them to do that, was Malmstadt and Enke. You have that book, I believe. Additionally, reporting to the vice president of engineering was a Component Evaluation group (they made sure the components in a kit were from quality vendors), a Drafting group who did drawings for every part, and a Manual Department who wrote the assembly manuals and made all of the detailed exploded line drawings so the customer could see where the parts were to go.
By the time I arrived at Heath, the Manual Department was the same size as the Design Engineering departments. And the design and manual-writing efforts for a kit took approximately the same number of hours. The detailed, thoroughly checked assembly manuals were a MAJOR contributor to the success of the Heathkit products.
Steve Leibson: Yeah, Malmstadt/Enke. Yes.
Chas Gilmore: Malmstadt and Enke had approached Heath — it must have been in the ‘64 or ‘65 timeframe. They said something like, "You know, we’d like to do some fully assembled versions of your kit instruments, and also some specialized instruments, but designing and building them with the Heath mentality, not the Hewlett Packard mentality, making them very much to the 80/20 rule so we can teach electronics and electronic instrumentation to chemists."
Malmstadt was at the University of Illinois. He was a doctoral advisor for Chris Enke, who, after getting his doctorate, was teaching at Princeton. By the time I got to Heath, Enke had left Princeton and was a professor at Michigan State in Lansing. When I joined the Scientific Instruments group in June of 1966, there were probably five of us that were engineers and there were three or four technicians, and the engineering manager, Chief Engineer Wayne Kooy.
They already had maybe a dozen instruments designed and in production. Additionally, we were venturing off into a new area because that was of great interest to Malmstadt and Enke. This was UV-visible spectroscopy. We were in the middle of the development of a modular spectroscopy system.
The core of it is a monochromator. A monochromator works as a variable wavelength or variable frequency filter for optical emissions (IR, Visible and UV). The monochromator input is a broad band of light, and the output is a selected wavelength. To do this, the monochromator used a sine bar, a grating mounted on the end of the sine bar, and an entry port with a 45-degree mirror that shot the light onto the grating, which moved under the control of a stepper motor to select variable wavelength light. There was an exit 45-degree mirror to reflect the light from the grating to the output port. In front of the monochromator, at the input side of the monochromator, you could put a number of different light sources, sample chambers, or a light source and sample chamber.
On the output side, you could put detectors—mostly photomultiplier tubes. They already had a strip-chart recorder, so you could strip-chart record the output synchronized to the monochromator wavelength position. Makes a spectrum analyzer for light. The strip-chart recorder was classic Heathkit innovation. It used a fountain pen with an ink cartridge that moved across the width of the chart paper following the input signal. This substantially lowered the cost of getting ink on the paper at some reduction in bandwidth.
A stepper motor moved the chart paper forward at controlled rates so you could plot amplitude versus time. These chart recorders cost one quarter, or less, than the cost of commercial/industrial strip-chart recorders. I remember one user saying, "I can buy multiple Heath strip-chart recorders for much less than the competitive products. If one fails I have a backup and I’m still ahead financially."
But again, it was teaching chemists and other physical scientists how to use electronic instrumentation, including understanding the fundamentals. So, they knew Ohm’s law, how an op amp worked, what gain blocks were, and how a power supply was built, etc.
As I said, I joined in ’66. I started out as a design engineer. The first project they gave me to design was an R [resistance] box.
Steve Leibson: Well, so this leads me to an interesting question. It seems like Heath had an entire team that designed just rotary wafer switches, because they used some of the most complex rotary switches I have ever seen in my life.
Chas Gilmore: Yes, we did use complex rotary switches. And the answer is, each individual engineer would design them according to what the product being designed needed. But there were people like Centralab that built them, okay. And you built around their shaft system, their wiper system, their wafer system, etc. But an awful lot of people in the electronic world used pretty complex wafer switches. That was the control logic behind a lot of product design prior to the availability of digital integrated circuits which, in later times, were used to implement a product’s control logic.
Another product at the time was — Malmstadt and Enke wanted to create a very modular system to teach digital electronics. It consisted of a whole series of cards that you could plug into what was called a training module. At the top of the cards, there was a plastic end cap with a series of holes. The user could stick in a piece of wire and interconnect the input or output of the board’s logic function to other inputs/outputs on that card or other cards. So maybe a card had two 3-input NAND gates. Another card had some flip-flops. And you could stick wires in that connected to the input of a NAND gate and then connect the output of a NAND gate into a flip flop, etc. to breadboard circuits. Again, this system was part of the teaching system.
Then they got the idea, "You know, what would be really good is to have some of those cards such that you could plug them into the motherboard in an instrument chassis and make up a counter timer, a frequency meter, and a DMM. An engineer in that group who had been promoted from the service department was in charge of that design. I guess I had been there maybe six months, and I was just beginning to wrap up this fairly exotic R box. I had become fascinated by the new TI 7400 series of digital ICs and had been kibitzing on the digital instrument design. Anyway, my boss came to me and said, "I’m taking you off of that project. You’re gonna do the digital meter." And so that was my first big project that went on the market a year or two later. It was 1,250 bucks. It was not an inexpensive instrument, in fact... hang on a sec, hidden away in my memorabilia section is this: that was the instrument. [holding up a photo of the EU-805 Universal Instrument].
Chas Gilmore designed the Heath EU-805 with early TTL parts from TI’s 7400 series. Image credit: Heath Company
Steve Leibson: Those are Nixie displays.
Chas Gilmore: You betcha. Those are Nixie displays. Originally, they were building the digital decade counter, latch and display driver cards using JK flip-flops and a lot of transistors. I got palsy walsy with the guys from TI, and, the next thing I knew, I had one card that drove each digit, and the card had a 7490...
Steve Leibson: Decade counter.
Chas Gilmore: A decade counter, followed by a latch, followed by a 7441, which theoretically could drive the 170 volts needed to operate the Nixie tubes.
Steve Leibson: Right. I never believed that.
Chas Gilmore: Well, I did, and I went through a lot of them before it finally got down to the point where they actually worked. The instrument functions were: frequency meter, counter/timer, and DMM. The DMM had a 0.05% accuracy. The original proposal was for a 1MHz frequency meter, and, when I got done with it, it was a 15MHz frequency meter with dual input channels so you could do AB timing, ratios, multi-source selection, etc. I must admit I got carried away, and they let me do it, and it was probably behind schedule by the time we got to the end. But that turned out to be a pretty good instrument.
An interesting story here. When I designed with the 7490, they were going for 24ドル in quantity. I was convinced the price would drop. When we went to market about two years later, they were 4ドル.95. I remember breathing a deep sigh of relief. The instrument would not have been viable with six 7490s at 24ドル each.
We went through a number of organizational changes at that stage of the game. Heath finally decided to restructure the Scientific Instruments group and put them under a separate marketing manager or business unit manager who was going to try to promote this business. I suspect it was not a profitable product line at the time, because the market was fairly narrow, you know, this is basically training equipment for chemists. The products were supported by three textbooks. The first was: "Electronics for Scientists: Principles and Experiments for Those Who Use Instruments"; the second was...
Steve Leibson: Digital Electronics for Scientists.
"Digital Electronics for Scientists" by Malmstadt and Enke. Image credit: Heath Company
Chas Gilmore: Right. And the third was a four-book series: "Instrumentation For Scientists," again all focused on teaching scientists the basic principles and use of electronic instrumentation. Malmstadt and Enke ran big summer seminars, but some of the higher-ups at Heath began to say, "Hey. This is not going to be a big market."
Initially they put the Scientific Instruments business group with one of the old Heath guys as the business unit head. At that time Heath was owned by Schlumberger and had been owned by Schlumberger since 1962, I think, and this is getting into the 1972 era, or something of that nature. All of a sudden, this guy that was the marketing guy — and he, by the way, had known Howard Anthony — he was one of the early people and had been part of the audio product line, etc. But they decided that they were going to replace him with a Schlumberger hotshot. He came in at the VP level, and this other guy got retired. I think that’s the best terminology.
The new guy looked at it [Scientific Instruments] and said after a while, "You know what? We need to focus a great deal more on the general instrumentation market and kind of ease our way out of this training electronics for scientists. We’ll continue it, but it’s not going to be the big thing." He came from Schlumberger oil well services and knew a lot about instrumentation.
In fact, we wound up selling off the spectroscopy line, because that was just too far out for Heath, at that stage of the game. Among other things, the old EU line – all model numbers for Malmstadt Enke products had a model number starting with EU – which was the educational instruments line. Those instruments were all green and white, and this guy transformed it to, I think, pretty much all white instruments.
By then I was an engineering section manager, and, all of a sudden, I assumed some product planning duties in addition to doing design engineering. We began cranking out frequency meters and function generators, strip chart recorders, quite a collection of instruments. Again, the new products were aimed at the general electronic instrumentation market rather than the training market. At Heath, the terminology was "wired." You had, you know, kit and wired products. And Scientific Instruments was pretty much the wired products line. It began to be a reasonable product line in terms of product functionality and value.
But, all of a sudden, we’d moved from virtually not having much in the way of competition when it was the EU product line and was the Malmstadt/Enke products to all of a sudden competing with Hewlett-Packard, Wavetek, Fluke, and Keithley, and just all kinds of people out there. Systron Donner, Weston, Fairchild. Lots and lots of instrumentation people.
Steve Leibson: Tektronix.
Chas Gilmore: And without really pouring the marketing resources into getting into that market…
So somewhere around about 1975, Heath did yet another reorg, and I got moved into the product planning group, which we called product line managers, and I was handed product planning for all of the kit instrument business and all of the assembled instruments. There were also product line managers for ham radio, general, audio, and TV. Most of those guys were people who had been promoted up out of engineering but seemed to have some marketing talent. They understood the principles of a product, planning, etc, and were steeped in the product line as very dedicated hobbyists in the line they were managing. Remember that all of Heath’s sales at that stage of the game were mail orders through a catalog and a growing line of retail stores, which was kind of a separate operation.
So, that was kind of the evolution of Heath’s Scientific Instruments. At that point, like I said, we cranked out quite a few products, but it was just a tough, tough marketplace.
One of the things I came up with as a product line manager was a line of — I think they were 100-watt power supplies, where you had a 7.5 volt, a 15 volt, a 30 volt, and a 60 volt power supply, or something like that, with various ampacities constrained by the power limit and, of course, voltage and current limits. You had remote sensing, you know, and I think all the functionality that went along with a good bench power supply. There were versions with analog meters and versions with digital meters.
As kits, they did fairly well. As assembled units, what I remember was getting what I refer to as many of my master’s degrees issued by non-universities and walking down the line of inventory in the warehouse, consisting of piles of these assembled power supplies that weren’t moving because about that time, the bottom went out of the power supply market. These assembled Heath power supplies were now priced at fairly premium prices compared to, you know, Hewlett-Packard, Kepco, Lambda, and other people who were aggressively out in the market and had good sales organizations. We were trying to do it mainly with mail order and attending shows. The stores did not really address the commercial/industrial instrumentation market.
So that was a pretty good lesson that I learned fairly quickly. Then Heath reorganized again. I’m trying to think what the trigger was, but at that point I became director of engineering for what they call technical products, which was all the amateur radio, all the instrumentation, marine, automotive, weather. There were a number of those products that came under my bailiwick. Then another guy was director of engineering for the consumer products, which were the televisions, the audio, and some of the general kinds of products. And that took us into the 1976 era.
Part 3 of this article series will discuss the Heath Company’s entry into the early microcomputer/personal computer market.
Do you have Heathkit memories to share? Please post them below in the comments.
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As you may recall, Dirk is an unconventional detective who believes in the “fundamental interconnectedness of all things.” The idea is that everything in the universe is interrelated, meaning that even seemingly random events or trivial details can have a meaningful connection. Dirk employs this approach to solve cases by embracing bizarre coincidences, odd insights, and intuition, which leads him to surprising and often cosmic truths that would otherwise seem unrelated.
On the off chance you were wondering, there have been a couple of TV interpretations that are loosely based (or not) on the original books, which were Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency and The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul. The 2010-2012 TV series originated in Britain and starred Stephen Mangan as holistic detective Dirk Gently and Darren Boyd as his sidekick Richard MacDuff. By comparison, the 2016-2017 TV series (well, two series, really) originated in the United States and starred Samuel Barnett as Dirk and Elijah Wood as his reluctant sidekick Todd.
But we digress...
The first thing that triggered my meandering musings on the interconnectedness of things is that, in a recent column, Arrggghhh! Now I Want an NI mioDAQ! (Ignore the ‘!’), I made mention of the fact that oscilloscopes back in the day were big, clunky, and horrendously expensive.
Well, I just read Steve Leibson’s column: The Rise and Fall of Heathkit – Part 1: Early Days. All I can say is that it’s fascinating to hear how the Heath company evolved into the form we used to know and love when I was coming of age. Steve’s column is based on his interview with Chas Gilmore, who joined the Heath Company in 1966 as a design engineer. Chas explained how it was that the first kit from Heath was an oscilloscope called the O-1 that sold for only around 39ドル.50 circa 1947. As Chas says, "... an oscilloscope at that stage of the game was one expensive instrument, and you know, 39ドル.50? You’ve got to be kidding me. I mean, that must have been a tenth to a hundredth the cost of most oscilloscopes at that stage of the game."
The second thing that caused my cogitations and ruminations on the interconnectedness of things involved a trio, triad, or troika, if you will, in the form of a column, a case study, and a press release. Let’s take these one at a time:
The Column: I recently realized that, although anyone involved in the design of large digital silicon chips is familiar with the term Network-on-Chip (NoC), relatively few people are cognizant of the underlying concepts, which caused me to write a column for the Ojo-Yoshida Report titled Welcome to the Wonderful World of NoCs .
I ended that column by introducing a new NoC-based soft tiling capability that was recently launched by the folks at Arteris IP. This is of particular interest for people designing system-on-chip (SoC) devices targeted at artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) applications.
The idea is that these SoCs often involve 2D arrays of processor clusters (where each cluster contains multiple processor cores) as part of the main SoC. These processor clusters will be connected using a coherent NoC. Also, any AI or ML blocks like neural processing units (NPUs) may involve 2D arrays of processing elements (PEs). These PEs will be connected by a non-coherent NoC.
Let’s use the term processing units (PUs) to embrace both processor clusters and PEs. The traditional way of implementing an array of PUs is to create the initial PU by hand, then to replicate (think "cut-and-paste") this PU into an array of PUs, then to generate the NoC, then to hand-configure the network interface units (NIUs) associated with the PUs (each PU has an NIU, and each NIU requires a unique ID/address so that the packets of data flying around the NoC know where they are coming from and where they are going to).
All this hand configuring is resource-intensive, prone to error, and frustrating, especially if—just when you’ve finished—the boss says something like, "we’ve decided to make a small modification to the original PU" (to which one might be forgiven for responding "Arrggghhh!").
The idea behind NoC-based soft tiling is that, after creating the original PU, you simply tell the NoC tools the required X-Y dimensions for your array, at which point it auto-replicates the PUs, auto-generates the NoC (either coherent or non-coherent, as required), and auto-configures the NIUs, all in a matter of seconds or minutes.
The Case Study: There’s a very interesting SiMa.ai Case Study on the Arteris website. This describes how—way back in the mists of time we used to call 2022—the folks at SiMa.ai developed and released the world’s first software-centric, purpose-built machine learning system-on-chip (MLSoC) platform that delivered an astounding 10X better performance per watt than its nearest competitive solution.
To be honest, I was so enthused by the contents of this case study that (and I know you are going to be surprised when you hear this) I wrote my How to Build a Multi-Billion-Transistor SoC column about it.
The point here is that, in order to create their MLSoC, the guys and gals at SiMa.ai used NoC technology provided by the chaps and chapesses at Arteris. In particular, the case study ended with a quote that caught my eye: "We’ve already started work on our next-generation device, and—with respect to the NoC—we didn’t even think of looking elsewhere because FlexNoC from Arteris was an automatic and obvious choice!" — Srivi Dhruvanarayan, VP of Hardware Engineering, SiMa.ai
The Press Release: All the above leads us to a recent press release: SiMa.ai Expands ONE Platform for Edge AI with MLSoC Modalix, a New Product Family for Generative AI.
This press release informs us that industry’s first multi-modal edge AI product family, SiMa.ai’s MLSoC Modalix, supports CNNs, Transformers, LLMs, LMMs, and Generative AI (GenAI) at the edge and delivers industry leading performance—more than 10X the performance per watt of alternatives.
Also, we are informed that: "SiMa.ai MLSoC Modalix is the second generation of the successful, commercially deployed first generation MLSoC. MLSoC Modalix is offered in 25 (Modalix 25 or "M25"), 50 (Modalix 50 or "M50"), 100 (Modalix 100 or "M100") and 200 (Modalix 200 or "M200") TOPS configurations, in multiple form factors, and is purpose-built to provide effortless deployment of Generative AI for the embedded edge ML market. Fully software compatible with first generation MLSoC, the MLSoC Modalix product family was designed to enable the capability to run DNNs, as well as advanced Transformer models, including LLMs, LMMs and Generative AI. Samples of MLSoC Modalix will be available to customers in Q4 of 2024."
Meet the MLSoC Modalix family (Source: SiMa.ai)
When we visit the MLSoC Modalix page on the SiMa.ai website, we discover that this truly is, as they say, "A Complete System-on-Chip." In addition to a "super-secret sauce" machine learning accelerator, this device boasts (nay, flaunts) a cornucopia of high- and low-speed I/O subsystems to interface with external devices and sensors; multimedia processing with video encode, decode, and a programmable DSP; boot security, system management, and debugging; huge amounts of on-chip memory along with access to humongous amounts of off-chip memory; an Arm A65 x 8 application processor and an image signal processor; and a network-on-chip and TrustZone security extensions.
The MLSoC Modalix is a complete system-on-chip (Source: SiMa.ai)
Now I’m wondering if the ML accelerator in this device is implemented as an array of processing elements connected by a mesh NoC. If so, I bet its creators are looking at the new Arteris soft tiling technology with awe and desire (perhaps accompanied by some gnashing of teeth and rending of garb), wishing it had been available when they were working on their Modalix devices. Oh well, perhaps they will avail themselves of this technology on their next-generation designs.
In Conclusion
The aforementioned press release made note of the fact that the rise of generative AI is changing the way humans and machines work together. Also, that "The next wave of the AI technology revolution will advance multi-modal machines with the ability to understand and process multiple forms of inputs across text, image, audio and visual. This shift will ripple across every industry, from agriculture and logistics, to medicine, defense, transportation and more."
I totally agree. I’m also blown away by how fast the folks at SiMa.ai are moving. And, as usual, I’m left wanting to know more. On what technology node are these devices implemented? How many transistors are in an M200? What will the world look like in 10-, 20-, 50-, and 100-years’ time? And—most importantly, how much will a bacon sandwich cost me in 2050? How about you? Do you have any thoughts you’d care to share on any of this?
]]>One day in October, I spent two hours on a Zoom call with Gilmore, and I’m publishing large excerpts from that interview in this 5-part article series. Part 1 covers the Heath Company’s founding and post-war entry into the electronic business. Part 2 covers the Heath Company’s and Heathkit’s heyday in the 1960s and through the mid-1970s. Part 3 covers the Heath Company’s entry into personal computers in the late 1970s. Part 4 will cover Zenith’s acquisition of the Heath Company in the 1980s and the eventual demise of the Heath Company’s electronic kit business in 1992. Part 5 concludes with Chas Gilmore’s final thoughts from the interview.
In this first article, I asked Gilmore about the Heath Company’s origins and about his life leading up to his joining the Heath Company as a design engineer in 1966.
Steve Leibson: They started as an airplane kit company.
Chas Gilmore: They did. One of the Heath engineers, a fellow by name of Terry Perdue, has done a lot of work on the original history of Heath. He published a book. There are a number of people that have written different stories about Heath. Terry’s is, as far as I can tell, by far the most accurate, so they’re probably as good a resource as anything for that history. I think about 1918, maybe even somewhat earlier, a guy by the name of Edward Bayard Heath got Heath going. He actually bought an existing "aeroplane" company. And yes, Heath was an airplane company in the beginning—kit aeroplanes. Then Heath died in an airplane accident—a prototype Heath aeroplane crashed.
Heath Parasol airplane (circa 1926-1932) at the Oshkosh EAA AirVenture air show in 2003. Image credit: FlugKerl2
The Heath Company was bought by Howard Anthony out of bankruptcy somewhere around 1935. He moved the company to Michigan, I think probably because he lived there, to a place called Niles, Michigan. Then he moved the company to Benton Harbor, Michigan. Benton Harbor and Saint Joe are Twin Cities, on either side of where the Saint Joseph River goes into Lake Michigan. During World War II, when the United States Government was scrambling to find anybody who had anything like aircraft in their name, they called what I think was called the Heath Airplane Company at that time, or something like that, and the company started making various and sundry airplane components, including a bunch of equipment that was electronics. We get to the end of the war, and, of course, everything downsized tremendously and...
Steve Leibson: And put a lot of surplus parts on the market.
Chas Gilmore: Oh, a ton of them. Indeed! Well, the company, basically, had two partners at that stage of the game. One guy took the hardware parts, the landing gear and all that stuff, and went off and formed another company. Howard Anthony kept the electronic side of it and fished around for something to build. One of the very interesting stories of that aspect is that the government was auctioning tons of electronic surplus. Apparently, Anthony bid on a batch, which turned into something like three or five boxcar loads of stuff. And the story I heard from some of the people who were around at the time, was that he’d kind of forgotten that he bid on it when the station master at Benton Harbor calls him up and said, "Mr. Anthony, you’ve got four or five railroad cars filled with electronic parts that you bought and you’ve got a week before the demurrage fee sets in on the boxcars." He went into scramble mode, talked to all kinds of friends, anybody he could, anybody who had a big barn or similar storage space, anything of that nature. Stored all this electronic stuff. And one of the items in this batch, in quantity, was the 5BP1 – that’s a 5-inch CRT.
The Heath Company’s first kit was the O-1 oscilloscope, which incorporated war-surplus electronic parts including the CRT and sold for 39ドル.50. This ad came from the November 1947 issue of "Radio News." Image credit: Heath Company
Steve Leibson: I suspected that we’d get into oscilloscopes quickly.
Chas Gilmore: Well, an oscilloscope was his first kit. The O-1 sold for 39ドル.50, I believe in about November of 1947. And by 1952, 1953, maybe even 1954, they were selling four or five million dollars’ worth of kits per year. The kits just started flowing like mad. And one of the things that was happening was that every time they ran out of some particular part, they would find a substitute somewhere along the line and change the model number of the kit. So, you got the O-1, O-2, O-3, O-4, in very rapid succession. And, of course, they added a VTVM very quickly, then some audio gear. I think it took them into the early fifties before they got into any amateur radio products, the first one being the A-1 transmitter.
A vacuum tube voltmeter (VTVM) kit quickly followed the success of Heath’s O-1 oscilloscope. This ad also came from the December 1947 issue of "Radio News." Image credit: Heath Company
Steve Leibson: So let me ask you about the oscilloscope, because...
Chas Gilmore: Yeah?
Steve Leibson: Right after the war, an oscilloscope was a pretty new instrument, even for the highest tech companies. So how did a Benton Harbor kit company come up with an oscilloscope design?
Chas Gilmore: Well, I actually, I think he looked at a magazine article and copied it. I think Howard Anthony was very pragmatic. He was one of the people who would have said, "You know, don’t design it if it’s already been designed." But further, to your point, there are two things that that brings to mind.
One, there were thousands of ex-GIs who had been exposed to electronics in World War II. So, there was a real market for lower cost stuff. The other point being an oscilloscope at that stage of the game was one expensive instrument, and you know, 39ドル.50? You’ve got to be kidding me. I mean, that must have been a tenth to a hundredth the cost of most oscilloscopes at that stage of the game. Now that ‘scope didn’t even meet the 80/20 rule. It was pretty low in performance. I forget. It may have been as low as 50KHz bandwidth and, like all the early scopes, it had recurrent sweep versus triggered sweep. I’m not exactly sure — I could go back and look that up somewhere — and they made fairly rapid progress, to like 5MHz vertical bandwidth. You needed 5 MHz to service TVs.
When I was in high school, which would have been in the fifties, I got my Ham license. One of your questions is, how did I get to know Heath? I built a bunch of Heathkits, including an Oscilloscope – an O-12 if I remember – because I got my amateur radio license when I was in high school and I had become enamored with electronics. Which was interesting because my father was a geologist, and his attitude toward the whole thing was, "Why are you fiddling with this electronic stuff? It’s a passing fad."
Steve Leibson: No.
Chas Gilmore: And I was quite a bit older before I realized. "Well, you know, a guy that thinks in 10,000-year increments would think that." And so, I knew — I really knew of Heath, and when I was coming up on graduating from college, why, you know, I was shopping around for a place to work versus graduate school, and...
Steve Leibson: What college was this?
Chas Gilmore: This was Hobart College, in Geneva, New York. Oh, yeah, you asked the question, I got a BS in physics there. It’s a small Liberal Arts school. Fact is, I believe the year I graduated was the last year they issued any BS degrees. After that, it was BAs. If I had my choice I would have gone to an engineering school. I’d been a ham for a good number of years, and, like I said, I was just fascinated with electronics.
My version of the 1957 Radio Amateur’s Handbook is so dog-eared that it is unbelievable because I just pawed and pawed over that thing. I was interested in radios as well as learning basic electronic circuit theory. Although most circuits were analog, I remember building flip-flops with old type 45 tubes because, see, I got them from old radios that I got from neighbor ladies who said, if you mow my lawn you can go up to my attic and rummage. So, I’d get an old radio and take it home with me and tear it apart and get all the resistors, capacitors, tubes, etc. Well, I wanted to go to an engineering school, and my father, who had been at MIT in the thirties, said, "You can go to an engineering school, but I’m not paying for a cent of it. You’ll get a lousy education."
Steve Leibson: That’s an interesting perspective after World War II.
Chas Gilmore: Well, it was, but remember, certainly when he was at MIT in the thirties, it was a very, very technical degree and by the time I was getting ready to head off to college he had moved from field geology into managing the whole research and development department. He was saying, "You know what? I never got any education in this area. All I got was just a solid technical education." Since then, and even by the time I was going to go to school, the engineering schools understood that you need more than calculus and circuit design theory. I saw somewhere that you graduated from Case [Western Reserve University in Cleveland].
Steve Leibson: That’s right.
Chas Gilmore: And an interesting side note on that. The last company that I dealt with was named PPM. Three of us bought that company in Cleveland, in Beachwood, and that company had been started by a guy who graduated from Case in 1942.
Steve Leibson: Hmm.
Chas Gilmore: And he went from Case to MIT Rad Lab and spent a number of years there, and then came back to Cleveland and founded this company, which we bought from him in 2003. At that point he was 80 years old, had severe macular degeneration, and had an office staff of three people just to help him function, in addition to the engineers, technicians, manufacturing people, etc. So, he was another Case graduate, but a little bit before your time.
Steve Leibson: A little bit. Yeah, I graduated from Case in ‘75.
Chas Gilmore: Right? Okay, so but a wonderful guy. And anyway, so...
Steve Leibson: So, you got your BS in physics, and did you go contact Heath, or did they find you?
Chas Gilmore: No, I wound up sending out a lot of resumes to different places and did a bunch of interviews. There is one that I remember which made quite a difference in my career trajectory. I don’t remember the name of the company, but I know it was in Washington, DC. It was a military radio company, and they were looking for design engineers. During the interview, I was put in a conference room. Two or three engineers came in and sat on the other side of the conference table. They began peppering me with mainly strictly technical questions and I remember a couple of times saying, "Well, I don’t think I know the answer to that question off the top of my head, but here’s where I’d go to get the answer in the following reference books." One of the guys looked at me and said, "That’s an unacceptable answer."
Steve Leibson: No. That’s an engineer’s answer.
Chas Gilmore: Yeah. So, I went back to Hobart at that time and sat down with the chair of the physics department. And I said, "Dr. Havorka, maybe I ought to just go on to graduate school because of this experience." He looked at me and he said, "Well, certainly you can take that choice if you want. But I’ll tell you, in three years people like that are going to be working for you."
And then I got an interview request from Heath. They were showing at the IRE/IEEE show in New York, at the Colosseum. It blew me away, because at that time they had both sides of a full aisle in that show, and it was by far the most packed exhibition area of all exhibits – all three floors of exhibits. I was interviewed by the VP of engineering, and the guy who was the, what we called the chief engineer, at the time. He was the engineering manager of the Scientific Instruments Department. Later, they said, "Come on out to Heath and go for an interview." And I did. Fact is, I have somewhere here the check that I bought for a round trip ticket from Geneva, New York, to Benton Harbor, Michigan via Chicago O’Hare... 57ドル. Anyway, I had an interview there. They made me quite a good offer, and I said, "I’m going." I started at Heath in June of 1966.
Part 2 of this article series will cover the two golden decades for Heathkits, the 1960s and 1970s. If you have Heathkit memories, please share them in the comments below.
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Ironically, this means I have tremendous respect for those who dive deeply into the analog waters (although I have to say their view that digital is only a subset of analog gets right up my nose).
Do you remember my column from earlier this year regarding Customized Analog for the Connected World? In that piece I introduced Orca Semiconductor, whose namesake is the apex predator killer whale (be afraid, be very afraid).
As you may recall, the folks at Orca are laser-focused on creating state-of-the-art analog and mixed-signal application-specific standard parts (ASSPs). According to World Semiconductor Trade Statistics (WSTS), the Analog ASSP market offers a total available market (TAM) of 52ドルB in 2024, increasing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 6% to 73ドルB in 2028.
More specifically, the chaps and chapesses at Orca decided to focus their attention on two market segments in particular: Smart Health and Smart Factories. In the case of Smart Health, the remote monitoring of vital signs for actionable insights is the future of healthcare, providing the empowerment of consumers to improve their lives. When it comes to Smart Factories, Industry 4.0 is driving intelligence onto the factory floor. Increased factory data boosts productivity, reduces downtime, and improves efficiency, for lower operating costs. Together, these two segments offer a TAM of 4ドルB in 2024, growing at 6.4% CAGR. Well, that should be enough to keep the guys and gals at Orca busy for a while.
As a company, Orca is a "new kid on the block," since it was founded in 2022, which is only two years ago at the time of this writing. On the other hand, among them, Orca’s three founders have 80+ years of experience. And, in conjunction with their team of 18 research and development (R&D) engineers, their storied history includes hundreds of patents.
The way the folks at Orca look at things, there used to be thousands of small analog companies in the world. Over time, after multiple mergers and acquisitions, we are left with a few "Big Analog" players. I tend to visualize these big analog entities as being like older statesmen reclining in plush leather chairs at their club, nibbling hors d’oeuvres, sipping port, smoking cigars, reminiscing over past achievements, reluctant to stir themselves into action.
By comparison, we can view a "Small Analog" company like Orca as being young, feisty, full of fun, and brimming with enthusiasm and ideas—much like your humble narrator (I pride myself on my humility), if I might be so bold.
Earlier this year, the folks at Orca released their first product in the form of the OS1000. This stands for Orca Semiconductor 1000—a simple naming convention that minimizes the possibilities for confusion. As I said in my earlier column, "Boasting a Linear Battery Charger and SYS output, dual buck converters, and dual LDOs/Load Switches, the QS1000 is—quite simply—the most advanced power management integrated circuit (PMIC) in its class for smart health, wearable, hearable, and other connected devices."
Well, I was just chatting with Andrew Baker, who is Co-Founder and CEO at Orca. Only a few months following their previous product pronouncement, the hot news off the press is that the guys and gals at Orca are announcing a new product. This time they are targeting Smart Factories. More specifically, they are focusing their attention on IO-Link. "What’s IO-Link?" I hear you cry. Well, as we read on the Wikipedia:
IO-Link is a short distance, bi-directional, digital, point-to-point, wired (or wireless), industrial communications networking standard (IEC 61131-9) used for connecting digital sensors and actuators to either a type of industrial fieldbus or a type of industrial Ethernet. Its objective is to provide a technological platform that enables the development and use of sensors and actuators that can produce and consume enriched sets of data that in turn can be used for economically optimizing industrial automated processes and operations. The technology standard is managed by the industry association Profibus and Profinet International. The IO-Link market may surpass 34ドル billion by 2028.
When this entry says, “The IO-Link market may surpass 34ドル billion by 2028,” it’s referring to the market for devices, components, and systems that use IO-Link technology.
This is where I must take my hat off to the folks at Orca. They’ve focused their attention on a well-established technology with humongous growth potential, and they’ve identified a specific niche for their Analog ASSP expertise where they can do something better and cheaper than the incumbents (the ones we last saw nibbling their hors d’oeuvres, sipping their glasses of port, and smoking their cigars). Consider a typical IO-Link block diagram with a sensor at one end of the link and an IO-Link Master at the other as illustrated below.
Typical IO-Link block diagram.
According to MachineMetrics: "There are over 26,000 IO-Link sensors from multiple providers that manufacturers can add to their machines and environments to capture data points. These IO-Link sensors are a valuable component of many automation initiatives as they enable access to key data points that have historically been difficult to collect."
The great thing about IO-Link is that it’s backwards-compatible with existing sensor installations, because it runs off the same 24V signaling capabilities as older, legacy sensors. This means you can quickly and easily retrofit new IO-Link sensors into existing factories using existing infrastructure, like their existing programmable logic controllers (PLCs). Having said this, IO-Link gives you a lot more flexibility in terms of things like the ability to remotely set parameters on a sensor.
Also, you now have expanded diagnostic capabilities. Consider an IO-Link device like a pneumatic actuator that’s operating a valve, for example. These actuators can age over time, still performing their primary function, but not as quickly and efficiently as they did in their youth. With IO-Link, we now have the ability to monitor the time it takes from us giving the signal to actuate to the actual closing or opening of the valve. It might be that the actuator is taking a few milliseconds more than it used to, and this delay is slowly increasing. This data can be fed into the factory’s artificial intelligence (AI)-based predictive maintenance system.
Today, a small to midsize factory may employ hundreds of IO-Link sensors and actuators for tasks like quality inspection, machine monitoring, and production line control. By comparison, a large-scale or highly automated facility may employ thousands of IO-Link sensors and actuators for applications spanning robotics, material handling, process monitoring, and energy management. Meanwhile, advanced use cases like semiconductor fabs or automotive plants may deploy tens of thousands of IO-Link sensors and actuators to ensure high-resolution, real-time data across a wide variety of equipment and systems.
The important point is that, thus far, IO-Link has only metaphorically touched the allegorical tip of the iceberg, as it were. According to available data, there are approximately 634,666 manufacturing businesses in the United States, and there are estimated to be around 10 million factories around the globe. Only a relatively small number of these facilities are using IO-Link to its full capacity (if at all), but the number is growing daily, which is what you want to hear if you are poised to enter (and eventually dominate) any portion of this market.
Now, observe the green boxes representing the IO-Link Transceivers in the previous diagram. Prior to what I’m about to tell you, there were only three main solutions on the market: the MAX22515 from Analog Devices, the TIOL112 from Texas Instruments, and the RH4Z2501 from Renesas. All three of these devices have different sizes and form-factors, but that really is not an issue because the MAX22515 sells way more than all its competitors combined.
Think of the MAX22515 as having a target painted on its back. This is where Orca’s new OS2000 leaps onto the center stage with a fanfare of sarrusophones (once heard, never forgotten). This IO-Link transceiver for industrial applications can be used in either IO-Link Sensor/Actuator or IO-Link Master applications.
In addition to featuring two control interface options (I2C or GPIO), the OS2000 integrates many additional features that simplify designs, including two linear voltage regulators, one digital input channel, an internal clock generator, and integrated surge protection (for input power, CQ, and the digital input channel). The linear 5V voltage regulators may be bypassed if an external 5V source is available. The internal clock generator may be used to provide an IO-Link timing-compliant clock to the system microcontroller, thereby simplifying designs. The OS2000 also features five different output frequency options, thereby allowing it to work with most microcontrollers.
But wait, there’s more, because the OS2000 features robust protection to external conditions on external facing interface pins (VLP, CQ, DI and GND). These pins are reverse voltage protected, short-circuit protected, hot-plug protected, and feature integrated ±1.2kV/ 500Ω surge protection
Do you want to know the really clever part? I bet you do! Are you ready? I bet you are! The clever part is that the OS2000 is the same size as the MAX22515 (2.0mm x 2.5mm), and it provides a drop-in, pin-compatible replacement that meets or exceeds the capabilities of the MAX22515 at a lower price. What’s not to love?
Want to learn more? Well, by some strange quirk of fate, the guys and gals from Orca will be demonstrating the OS2000 at the SPS Conference, which will take place just next week (November 12-14, 2024) as I pen these words. You will be able to find them in Hall 8 on Stand 210.8. Feel free to bounce into their booth, give Andrew a great big hug, and tell him "Max says Hi."
I look forward to hearing his reaction. In the meantime, do you have any other thoughts you’d care to share on any of this?
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