[time-nuts] Fine print on HP 5334B

[Hal Murray]

> Every time I dig through the 5370 schematics, I think to myself
> "wouldn't it be nifty to build a replacement plug-in card with a
> modern fast CPU to run the instrument", but I try and stop myself
> there. 

Suppose you start with an FPGA on a PCI card.

What sort of front end would you want?  What can you build with home/hacker 
technology?

My straw man is something to turn a digital signal out of a comparator into a 
ramp that gets feed into an A/D clocked on the system's internal clock.  The 
ramp needs to be a little over a cycle wide.

Anybody got a circuit to make a linear ramp?

Maybe the front half of the standard R/C exponential is good enough.  Fixup 
the non linearities in software.

Somebody has mentioned a chip that does all this magic.  I forget the number 
but it's in the archives.  I think it's European and maybe a touch pricey but 
maybe not if it avoids the A/D and friends.

-- 
These are my opinions, not necessarily my employer's.  I hate spam.