Hello,

So we start today's newsletter off with something a bit unusual. One of the links will go 404 when you click on it. "Andy, why are you being annoying", you might ask.

Tomorrow is International Pirate Day, where kids, and the ones who never really grew up, go to school and work and talk like a pirate. Last year, my first Pirate Day as an editor here, we had some fun with a new product launch by National Instruments by writing their announcement up in piratespeak.

So, why not make it annual?

Since this newsletter only goes to you on Tuesdays and Thursdays, it's probably more annoying for you to get one more email than it is for me to just provide you the link to the piratespeak article that will be live on Friday, Sept 12, but lands on a 404 page until then. Just make a note in your calendar for tomorrow to revisit this email and the universe is back in harmony again.

A couple of blogs for you today from Bill Wong and myself that will hopefully be thought provoking, interesting, or be useful. No spoilers.

We've also restored a nice article from the archives on Class-D amplifiers.

In the lede, Murray gives an overview of four buck converters from Diodes Inc. The converters incorporate 500-mΩ power MOSFET switches to deliver up to 3.5 A of continuous output current. The converters' input covers the full automotive battery range from 5.5 V to 80/100 V, including load dump scenarios.

Murray's a big fan of 48V architecture, a zealot, whereas I'll be polite and say I'm neutral about it and, to me, it makes little sense unless you have a single 6 foot wiper blade on your truck with a 3hp motor to run it.

That said the outputs of these buck converters, looking at the datasheet, is much much nicer than meh-48V and spans a sweet adjustable range of 1.2V to 50V. Good for all sorts of stuff...

arrr!

-andy