I’m pleasantly pleased that this last ware took longer than a couple hours to guess. The winner of last month’s name that ware is Jeremy, for being the first to nail it fairly squarely: “I would guess this is something like a 5×7 LED character driver…”. This ware was a guest submission by echo, and I think I’ve learned something important about a Name that Ware that I haven’t been doing to date–I tend to include a full picture of the device, but echo just provided a small portion of it that was just sufficient to guess its function. I will endeavor to do this more after this month’s competition to add a little challenge factor. I was lucky to have guessed this myself when I saw it first; I only recognized it myself because I had looked at a similar version of this under a microscope many years ago and marvelled at the wire-bonded beauty of the LED array back when I was working on my thesis and I dropped one of these on a circuit board I was building at the time (see the lower of the two images shown at the link–it’s the glowing red display; some may recognize it from another hack that I did!). Jeremy, drop me an email to claim your prize!

Echo was kind enough to provide me some photos of the ware itself:

It’s the HDSP 2003, as you can see, which was back then was made by HP; this was then spun off into Agilent. Agilent then spun or sold this group into Avago Technologies. I hope that not too many of the employees lost their jobs between all of these reorganizations.

Below are some “action shots” that echo sent me as well. Thanks a bunch, echo!

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 1st, 2007 at 2:54 am and is filed under Hacking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.