Another piece to the puzzle

One of my favorite stories comes from a kindergarten student brought before the teacher to face charges of selfishness. "It seems you do not like to share with the others." "Oh, I do! I just don't like them messing with my stuff." The vast majority of integrateds achieve their compactness from a shared power supply, but this design technique shortchanges performance. As I mentioned in yesterday's post, all the major benefits we might expect when building an integrated, such as, eliminating interconnects, and matching colorations of components within the system can be diminished or lost when power supplies are shared. The importance of power cannot be overstated. After all, an amplification device is nothing more than a modulated power supply. And yet designers in our field have consistently treated the source of power as an afterthought, like the proverbial red-haired stepchild (apologies to any of you qualifying on both accounts). The single biggest problem in the artform known as the integrated is the shared power supply and, even if you went to the trouble of assigning each system its own, you still feed them with one shared power cord, thus losing benefits enjoyed by separates. Sharing has its joys, but power supplies and cords need to be selfish.