• TimeSquirrel@kbin.social
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    1 month ago

    the lower voltage they operate at calls for more attention to be paid to signal integrity between the CPU and memory

    And they aren’t kidding around, modern high speed signals are so fast that a millimeter or less of difference in length between two traces might be enough to cause the signals to arrive at the other end with enough time skew to corrupt the data.

    Edit: if you ever looked closely at a circuit board and seen strange, squiggly traces that are shaped like that for seemingly no reason, it’s done so that the lengths can be matched with other traces.

    • SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      A millimeter is huge in these situations. USB3 requires 5 mil tolerances, just over 0.1 mm. This scales with the inverse of data rate.

      Electronics are so fast that we gotta take the speed of light into account. God help you if you put too sharp a bend in a trace, too …

            • borari@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              1 month ago

              Yeah, I’ve never heard of that before either. What I have heard of is either MOA or MIL reticles. In that context a Mil stands for milliradian, which is a representation of angle. That definitely doesn’t track with the post though.

              • Excrubulent@slrpnk.net
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                1 month ago

                And it’s especially confusing for people who use sane measurement systems where “mil” is short for “millimetre”, because it’s just the start of the word. I think anyone that still insists on measuring things in thousandths of an inch should keep their own bespoke lingo too, and everyone else should steadfastly refuse to acknowledge “mil” in this context.

            • curiousPJ@lemmy.world
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              1 month ago

              A couple old metrology equipment dated back from the 80s I still use calls them ‘mil’. It’s got dual dials for mil/mm. Gets me confused sometimes because the gauge can go down to couple millionths of an inch/couple 10s of nanometers.

              LVDT for those curious.

        • flying_gel@lemmy.world
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          1 month ago

          A millimeter i.e a thousands of a meter.

          edit: I was wrong, confusingly enough it is a thousands of an inch

          • Aceticon@lemmy.world
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            1 month ago

            In the design and manufacture of PCBs (aka circuit boards) a “mil” is a one thousandth of an inch, so it makes sense that’s what is being used in this context.

            Also the maths check out: 0.005 inches is equal to aprox 0.12mm, “just over 0.1mm”.

            • flying_gel@lemmy.world
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              1 month ago

              I stand corrected, and I see I didn’t read the comment thoroughly enough either.

              Colloquially as a non-pcb maker I would use and hear the term “mill” as short form millimeter so I assumed it was that.

              so TIL :)

              • Aceticon@lemmy.world
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                1 month ago

                Yeah, I found it wierd too when I started designing PCBs (as hobby) that “mill” actually stood for thousanth of an inch.

                Probably for historical reasons, there are tons of things in the older domains within electronics that are based on inches rather than metric units: for example the spacing between the legs of a microchip in the older chip package formats (so called DIP, the ones with legs that go into holes) is exactly 0.1"

                The sizes in more modern electronics isn’t usually based on inches anymore, but circuit boards are old tech (even if done with new materials) so there are still a number of measures in there which are based on inches.

      • TimeSquirrel@kbin.social
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        1 month ago

        Haha, I’m still over here messing with 10/100 Ethernet and USB 2 on my home projects. I’m used to bigger tolerances than the truly high tech stuff.