Slangs and Myths of Indian Electronics Market of Practiced Skill Force

In India, there is a large majority of practiced skill force, those who don’t have any certificate or diploma, but they still rule in the market by practicing a niche of the industry. This article aims to reveal slangs and myths ,without hurting anyone’s feelings.

I have been in the electronics domain since 1999 equivalent to over 23 years. During this span ,I have met and dealt with a fraternity of people who do not have any certificate in electronics but they are frontline workers ruling the market on ground zero by practicing a niche for long time. Here 5 topics explained below to give you a bird eye view of the fraternity.

This will look weird and awkward listening does such kind of IC really exists! No, there is no such IC made by any foundry in the world. Actually, this is a slang name given to ‘’Single in Line”, SIL, a package of ICs. Like LA4440. The name has been discovered as this kind of ICs looks similar to the comb we use for hairs.

Be it ceramic capacitors, polypropylene, film, or paper capacitors all are addressed with “PF”. The reason behind this is that all of them don’t have any polarity that can be fixed anyway. I came to know this when one practiced engineer told me that ‘’ PF is short-circuited”, and when I checked that 104 ceramic capacitor was short-circuited.  

We all know a transistor has three pins. But there are plenty of ICs available in this “TO-92” package, like the very popular one TL493 used a voltage reference. Even some still believe that the LM78xx and LM79xx series of regulators available in the “TO-220” packages are also transistors!

This is another fuss that be it firmware or source code both are software. Actually, the right word for the microcontroller’s program is “Firmware” but this is also referred as “Software”. And similar to Source Code it is also Software.

This is the most common warning one gets when he/she gets to flash their mobile device for any glitch or update Actually, the main reason behind is unproper handling of the device, like not using ESD, Electrostatic Discharge, protecting device and not using genuine connecting cables and using pirated software to Flash the NAND.

I was getting my DTH, Direct To Home, system installed. One engineer asked his junior " get him the camera for the dish", I was amazed to see when the junior person gave LNB, Low Noise Breaker. Actually, according to them, LNB captures the signals like a camera so for convenience they refer LNB as Camera.