From jake92028@yahoo.com Mon Nov 14 09:30:37 2005
Subject:IC's and keyboards

Under what circumstances can a keyboard player expect more/less
playing time before they're trying to get a specific failed IC board,
or I guess it could be the whole "mother board" from the manufacturer
of their keyboard? What can you do to extend the life of keyboard IC
chips, capacitors, ect.. if anything? I'm thinking about Barry's VK7
problems and my Roland VK and Fantom boards which have some time on
them - especially at the moment this nice old VK7 I just got and
really like. At what point in time does the manufacturer say, "Sorry,
Charley?"

Walter j

*FYI: Integrated Circuit

An integrated circuit (IC), sometimes called a chip or microchip, is
a semiconductor wafer on which thousands or millions of tiny
resistors, capacitors, and transistors are fabricated. An IC can
function as an amplifier, oscillator, timer, counter, computer
memory, or microprocessor. A particular IC is categorized as either
linear (analog) or digital, depending on its intended application.

Linear ICs have continuously variable output (theoretically capable
of attaining an infinite number of states) that depends on the input
signal level. As the term implies, the output signal level is a
linear function of the input signal level. Ideally, when the
instantaneous output is graphed against the instantaneous input, the
plot appears as a straight line. Linear ICs are used as audio-
frequency (AF) and radio-frequency (RF) amplifiers. The operational
amplifier(op amp) is a common device in these applications.

Digital ICs operate at only a few defined levels or states, rather
than over a continuous range of signal amplitudes. These devices are
used in computers, computer networks, modems, and frequency counters.
The fundamental building blocks of digital ICs are logic gates, which
work with binary data, that is, signals that have only two different
states, called low (logic 0) and high (logic 1).