Miracle FET

First of all, for those of you who have watched too many Star Wars movies, and/or are not familiar with electronics, this has nothing to do with Boba Fett, The Force, or the Death Star. Although Darth Vader could teach the senior management at the Biotech Mecca a thing or two about motivational techniques. Do not fail me Admiral.

Captain Fantastic brought in his electronics wizard as a consultant. He constantly reminded us that his man had twenty five years experience (f**king it up) in Silicon Valley. In fact, the man had some skill. He managed to take the Mecca for $50,000 and only delivered a board cut at a 15° angle.

Anyhow, the instrument has a heater that draws in the neighbourhood of 20A of current. We wished to switch the heater with a Field Effect Transistor (FET). Unfortunately, the circuit that this Silicon Valley Veteran had conceived kept blowing the FET. It seems that even a small junction resistance turns into a lot of power when you have a high current. The Sarcastic Brit mentioned that this may be what was causing the FETs to burn up. There's nothing like the smell of burned plastic in the morning. The consultant insisted that the FETs didn't dissipate any power. I'm reminded of the Simpsons "In this house, young lady, we OBEY the laws of thermodynamics."

Captain Fantastic stepped in at this point. His addition to the discussion was that nobody at the Mecca was an electrical engineer, so we should all just trust his man, who had been doing things right in Silicon Valley for over 25 years.

That's right, Captain Fantastic's consultant had managed to defy the laws of physics and produce Miracle FETs.

A couple of days later, the Sarcastic Brit got a voice mail from the consultant. It went something like this:
I was... um... looking at the data sheet for that FET... and... um... It looks like it does have a pretty high junction resistance... um... It looks like... um... it would probably... um... dissipate quite a bit of power at 20A. I don't think... um... that it will handle that much current.

For weeks after that, the Sarcastic Brit would play that message on his speaker phone and just grin. He would also occasionally forward a copy of it to Captain Fantastic. I think that it was the saddest day of his life when he learned that the phone system deletes old messages after two months.

Shortly after the phone message we had an engineering team meeting to discuss what everybody was working on. It turns out that of the six members of the engineering team at that time, exactly half of the team was composed of electrical engineers. In addition we discovered that the Sarcastic Brit was just waiting until the appropriate time to inform Captain Fantastic that he was one of those three electrical engineers.

Inconceivable.