Wednesday, July 20, 2011

Vanity chips

Have you ever heard of the company Valens Semiconductor? I hadn't either, until last night.

In 2009 Valens Semiconductor together with LG, Samsung and Sony announced their intention to launch a cross-industry alliance to promote and standardize the HDBaseT technology for whole-home distribution of uncompressed HD multimedia content. A few days later Valens announced the availability of an HDBaseT-compliant chipset: the VS100, consisting of the VS100TX transmitter and the VS100RX (receiver). This chipset enables the convergence of uncompressed full HD digital video, audio, 100BaseT Ethernet, power and control through a single, standard 100m/328ft LAN cable.
(I got this from their website)

To me this sounds like an interesting chipset (although a bit out of my league) for more than one reason. One of those reasons is the printing on the chip. Why?


Well, you may not know it, but my name is Valens. Before the era of internet my family and me knew of very few other people named Valens. There was of course Richie Valens, but that is not his real name, and there were some roman emperors named Valens (I have a coin to prove it). Now that the world population is massively coming on line more and more people and companies named Valens surface.

If you are an electronics engineer and your name happens to be National, Renesas or Avago you can easily find chips with your name on it, but for most other people such an opportunity is pretty rare. And I just came across one!

I want this chipset. Not for building something with it, but to keep on my desk. I want a vanity chip(set). Of course I have contacted the company and asked for a sample. If I get hold of one of these chips I will of course post it here.

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