small planet

[The Proteus]

Martin & List,

	When I was in Active Electronics, our instructor actually took us
through a little history of semiconductors, and their relation to valves a
long time ago. As most of you know around here, when you set up a
Common-Emitter transistor amplifier with standard voltage divider bias,
there are multiple voltages you need to take into account like Vbe and Vce
in order to set the circuit up properly. From what we were taught, the
indices of cc, ss, dd, and ee in fact do come from old days of
transistors, since the first integrated circuits included mostly
transistor circuits, where Vcc is the collector-collector voltage, and Vss
is the source-source voltage - more commonly known as the positive power
rail. Same goes for Vdd and Vee and the negative power rail. 
	In digital electronics, most people assume that Vcc is equivalent
to +5V, but in recent years that term has been mentioned loosely with the
slew of voltage processes that the industry has seen. I've seen Vcc3.3,
Vcc2.7, and Vcc1.8 in some kludgier systems, to separate all of the
different power rails.
	Well, I hope I didn't screw up too badly... if there are any
erroneous remarks in this, please let me know. 

The Proteus

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On Thu, 20 Apr 2000, Martin Czech wrote:

> The world is a small planet. The LDR book is still on my desk, a
> colleague walks in, he sees the book and tells me that he worked for
> Valvo in another life and that he edited this very book!
> 
> Now to my question.
> 
> We often see supply pins labeled with Vcc,Vee,Vss,Vdd.  I believe that
> the indices mean collector, emitter, source and drain.  I believe that
> the writers/artists have npn or nmos transistors in mind when labeling
> drawings with this, So Vdd and Vcc means positive supply, Vee and Vss
> negative. This can be different for PMOST-techologies (BBD). But nobody
> told me so, and I have never seen a text saying so.
> 
> Is this so?  Who invented this notation?
> 
> People start to mix it up, I've seen Vee and Vdd together , which makes
> not much sense for a CMOS chip then.
> 
> Since this is a small world, perhaps anybody knows some of the responsible
> old timers ?
> 
> m.c.
> 
>