Bonkers Birthday Badinage

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Our 100th episode! Thank you so much to everyone who has continued listening and supporting us! And thanks to Jeff Keyzer for helping us continue broadcasting each week!

• Happy (recent) Birthday Dave! What an awesome cake! And a video documenting the details!
• The Amp Hour has an updated server!
• We also have a brand new Discussion Server (http://discuss.theamphour.com) to try and promote more community among our listeners. We want you all to get to know one another. Check out that link or the "Discuss" link at the top of the page!
• Car Talk is going off the air soon after 25+ years of radio. Sad!
• Miroslav Batek has this great idea for stick-on labels for micros with the pinout!
• Dave will have a booth at the upcoming Electronex show in Sydney. What should he do at his booth?
• The Canton Fair coming up in China will have over 210,000 buyers. Wow!!
• Fabs are being built all over the world. TSMC just announced they're building a 450mm fab for $8-10B! That's a lot of money!
• Speaking of large chip companies, Intel's head of mobile dismissed ARM as a competitor recently. Really? Where are the phones with Intel chips?
• Looking for old semi equipment? Alvaro let us know about the used semi equipment you can buy from Texas Instruments online. Someone call Jeri!
• Got some old machines? Make some analog chips! Fab processes move down the chain from digital to analog, as laid out by a VP from TI, Dr. Venu Menon. He was being interviewed by our guest from last week, Steve Leibson.
• Graduating from school soon? Looking for work? One of our listeners, Cody Shaw, wrote in about his 555 business card.
• @Laen has recently transitioned the Dorkbot PCB service over to OSHPark! Check out the new site!
• Fluxor from Engineer Blogs wrote a few weeks back about his interview style for new engineers. The main lesson? Know your basics!
• Dave got a $30, 7" TFT-based eReader. Chris reiterated his point of view about abstracting interfaces for devices.
• Sensationalizing technology in the media: CNBC reports on the "Backdoor" put into an Actel FPGA.
• Through Silicon Vias are crazy. Texas Instruments is now doing trying them on their 28 nm process. Dave did a video about orders of magnitude: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjvIy04PwYI
• Chip of the Week!
  • TI (really the now-defunct National Semi--you can tell by the part name) now have a controller to create a GaN based Buck controller (for high temperature, high voltage or fast switching), the LM5113 GaN Controller. It's amazing how delicate these devices are for being able to handle so much voltage across them!

Thanks for listening for the past 100 episodes! We appreciate it so much!

Be sure to drop by the Discussion Area and get to know one another! See you there!

Thanks to kcgiessen for the party soundclip!