The Ware for January 2012 is shown below. Click on the image for a much larger version.

Ok, let’s get the obvious bit out of the way with — it’s a speakerphone of some type, as evident from the gross construction. The question is what make and what model?

I wanted to highlight in this ware a couple of interesting construction points. A speakerphone needs to have excellent echo cancellation, otherwise you get feedback from the speaker to the mic. This speakerphone does a great job in the physical construction to create as much isolation as possible. First, the speaker is isolated from the rest of the body on an “island” of plastic. The housing itself uses a rubber gasket with an air-tight (hot-glue filled) through-hole providing a quality acoustic suspension speaker enclosure.

Then, the microphone is basically in a cradle of rubber. There’s a rubber gasket to isolate the microphone enclosure from the case, and then the microphone itself is suspended in yet another rubber holder. The hole for the microphone to the outside world is generously sized to eliminate the resonant filtering effects of going through a tube, and then the whole assembly is angled with respect to the table to mitigate reflections from the housing to the table.

Even though there is a substantial amount of DSP in the box doing echo-cancellation, there’s nothing like good and simple mechanical design principals to make a product even better.

The Ware for December 2011 was a Nichia NDV4313, or a fake of it. The NDV4313 is a 120mW, 405nm laser diode. However, there is another part running around China that seems nearly identical in spec and construction to the NDV4313, but the cost is over two orders of magnitude cheaper. I thought this was an interesting differential in pricing, so I bought some samples to investigate.

When I looked at the ware under a microscope, I was struck by its magnificent construction. If you notice from the photo, the very top chip on the stack has a clear substrate. That’s a near-perfect crystal of sapphire, onto which a thin layer of Gallium Nitride is deposited. The sapphire crystal is cleaved and polished so that the ends form the mirrors for the laser cavity. The laser itself is bonded to the monitor photodiode, which I’m guessing is made out of silicon, and then that is mounted to a gold slug which serves as the ultimate heat sink. It’s quite a work of art.

I’m guessing that no Chinese manufacture is actually “faking” a process this intricate, so most likely these diodes came from a Nichia fab, but are either rejects, relabels, or excess quantities of a legitimate, high-volume product washed through the gray market onto the shores of my lab bench.

Picking a winner was difficult as usual. A lot of correct answers; plum33 was first (and also last month’s winner), but f4eru actually mentioned Nichia in his response. Exercising fully arbitrary judgement authority, I’ll say f4eru is the winner. Congrats, email me to claim your prize!