I have been looking for a book that would explain the basic principles involved in designing electronic circuits (i.e. what a person should know, how the person should think and so on).
There are many books that seem to explain how analog or digital components function and as far as the digital ones are concerned, how to even group them together to create purely digital circuits. But I have been looking for something that explains the process of placing analog components together to create an analog circuit.
Does anyone know if "Electronics - Circuits and Systems" by Owen Bishop is good in this regard, or is there something better?
Selected items from my bookshelf and web surfing list
Numero Uno Startup book:
Horrowitz and Hill, Art of Electronics
Boylestad , Introductory Circuit Analysis 9th ed or more recent OP-AMPS -Application,and Troubleshooting, David. L Terrill Electronic Devices, Floyd
If your looking for "cookBooks":
The 555 timer applications handbook.
If you need a basic book for kids:
Electronic Circuits for the Evil Genius, Cucher ONLY IF: you do the experiments which need about 18$ of parts. (The only one of the Evil genius books that is not a joke IMHO)
For systems design:
P. C. D. Hobbs, Building Electro-Optical Systems: Making It All Work
The content is optics dependent, but it gets you in the mindset of a good systems designer. (and a successful one at that )
For HF/ Low VHF frequency RF, its ham radio specific, but it makes you think:
Experimental Methods in Radio Frequency Design, Hayward et al.
If you want to ponder why folks do what they do by ruining your eyes looking at schematics at 10 pm :
Jim Thompson, PE, "SEDs resident curmudgeon"
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click on SED schematics
This guy comes up with old 1970s ways to do things with 69 cent parts.
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If you can get them surplus some place: , the US Navy NavShips Basic Electronics I and Basic Electronics II books They have been replaced by a lame online course call NEET, as the navy has gone over to depot level card swapping. Way outdated, but the books make you think about basics applied to radar and communicatiosn etc.
"Analog Circuit Design - Art, Science, and Personalities" Edited by Jim Willians Published by Butterworth Heinemann A collection of essays and stories by 22 famous engineers including Jim Williams, Bob Pease, Barrie Gilbert, Gary Gillette e.t.c.
On a sunny day (Wed, 31 Dec 2008 20:07:38 -0800 (PST)) it happened S Claus wrote in :
There is no book that can replace hands on experience in trying to design and build electronic circuits. You could get close with a spice simulator, but only so much.
So:
0) learn basics about electrons.
1) try to build some circuits, start from other people's designs that work.
2) learn basic math to get some idea of magnitudes etc.
In fact, referring to point '0', we know very little about what an electron really is, not even its size.
It is a rather wide field, and after so many years I only am familiar with a subset. It is a never ending learning process. But again, without you actually trying to build something, and using a scope and other equipment, getting a feel for what is real, and what are wild ideas, you will be a demonstration of the difference between 'information' and 'knowledge'. Even if a book gives you the needed information, that does not mean you have the knowledge to put it to work. Like swimming, you may know how to move, have learned it from a book, but will sink when put in real water. Have you ever used a soldering iron?
And, these days, analog and digital are so close together that you need to have experience with both, plus programming languages, if you want to make anything.
The underlying process is the same for analog and digital: You use a "building block" approach to get a basic design, then you decide what needs to go into each block. Eventually you may want to optimize everything to save costs, improve performance, or use parts on hand. But the first step is the block diagram.
To aid in this, you'll want a "bag of tricks" that you can use for the various blocks. Initially this bag will be simple op-amp gain stages, summers, buffers, etc. Then you'll probably add filters and oscillators and other more-complex blocks. When you see a circuit in a magazine or trade journal, note the essential blocks that you might re-use in your own circuits.
For example, the circuit might be using a diode junction to measure temperature, and converting to a pulse train whose rate is proportional to the temperature. From this you might get separate "blocks" for converting temperature to voltage via a diode, and for voltage-to-frequency conversion.
I like to keep file folders for the basic blocks, and file the article under the appropriate block type. (You might have to decide between the "temperature" and "voltage-to-frequency" folder in the above example.) Then when you need a particular block function, you can review a number of alternatives. Sometimes the "classical" way is overkill, and a "cheap-and-dirty" block is all you need, so it's good to save everything.
Best regards,
Bob Masta DAQARTA v4.51 Data AcQuisition And Real-Time Analysis
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Scope, Spectrum, Spectrogram, Sound Level Meter FREE Signal Generator Science with your sound card!
Besides the many good suggestions from others, the very best way to learn electronic design is with SPICE. The days of designing with pencil and vellum are over. And the best spice is free. Get LTspice and join the Yahoo forum at
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Get all the help files you can find and learn the terminology. Go through the FILES folder in the forum and try all the examples. Some may not make much sense in the beginning, but eventually things will start to gel and come together. When you have learned enough about spice to enter schematics yourself, do the examples in
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This will get you up to speed faster than anything else I know.
With spice, you don't have to worry about destroying components due to a miswire or other mistake. You can make changes and analyze them much faster than with hardware.
You don't have problems with grounding, crosstalk, bypassing, ringing, scope probe loading, probe resonance and ringing, intermittent connections, component variations, bad components, poor connections, power supply ripple and noise, offsets due to thermal drift, interference from SCR dimmers and fluorescent lights, uncalibrated or bad test equipment, and a host of other problems when trying to implement a circuit in hardware. And the circuit will work exactly the same way every time, so you don't have to waste time trying to figure out what changed since the last time you turned it on.
Learn how a circuit is supposed to work first, then you can diagnose and solve the other issues much easier.
Spice is so crucial to electronics that I ask prospective engineers and technicians to bring along their favorite LTspice files for the interview. If they don't have any, I can't afford to waste time having them learn it on the job.
Without spice, you will find many people who are highly skilled at bs in electronics. With spice, there is no faking it. You very quickly find if they know their stuff or not.
So put most of your effort into learning spice. It will pay handsome returns later.
Spice is so crucial to electronics that I ask prospective engineers and technicians to bring along their favorite LTspice files for the interview. If they don't have any, I can't afford to waste time having them learn it on the job.
Since most of the things I do don't "model" well, I'm curious what your product line is, ie what product do you make that you can get away with that and make money?
Pencil and Paper still gets used here for first order approximations, and will until I can no longer buy pens and paper.
I'll second the recommendation of Analog Circuit Design - Art, Science, and Personalities, especially the chapter by Richard S. Burwin on rapid design of filters and control loops.
...and anyone who falls by alt.binaries.schematics.electronic at any given point in time is likely to see something done by Larkin on quadrille paper. (High-latency Port 80 access via
For those recommending Horowitz and Hill's Art of Electronics (2nd edition still, I suppose), then I think it is VERY important for someone reading it to also have the student manual, as well, by Hayes and Horowitz. It includes many "worked examples" which not only provide specific calculations but also the sequence (placing which things go first and which go second, in designing.) For example, they include for chapter 2 worked examples on a common emitter amplifier and a differential amplifier (BJT.) Stuff you won't find in the textbook. For someone trying to learn on their own, invaluable.
Yep. Copying without understanding is NOT education/engineering.
...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC\'s and Discrete Systems | manus |
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| Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
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If you know what you are doing and looking for, it saves some calculations and/or bench time. It's pretty nice when you want to verify what you already feel you understand to a fair degree but where you want some key facets calculated for you that might take some calculator time and where you might flub up at some step in the complex chain. The Spice program will consistently do the same thing for you, without accidentally moving a decimal point or picking up the wrong substep worked earlier when moving forward later on.
It's like a good computer language compiler, in that way -- which consistently produces equivalent code and flawlessly does the required bookkeeping along the way. But if you don't know why the code was written the way it was, the compiler isn't going to help you understand it much better.
Theory is how we give meaning. Without theory, results are noise. So running the output without having some theory in mind about the input will only yield "so much noise." So knowing __why__ is important, I think, when using Spice.
On the other hand, if you do understand _some_ things but are just a little bit short of understanding enough of them -- then Spice can yield just enough 'extra noise' in the results to push you towards the rest of the understanding you may be missing. But what is important then is that you already have much of it in mind and are close, but just not yet grasping the fuller picture. Then some various runs in Spice may force an "Ah, hah!" moment to gel some other theoretical idea you'd read but hadn't yet put into context. But this doesn't excuse avoiding studying theory as a prelude to using Spice.
To put what Spice is really, really good at into sharp relief, imagine starting with learning the basic concepts -- voltage, current, and resistance -- and Ohm's law. One quickly finds some easy facility calculating values for DC voltage dividers and various simple combinations. Then one is faced, someday, with a wye or delta or wheatstone bridge or something still more complex with various voltage sources and current sources and not easily yielding to early knowledge. Facing up to that, one may learn to use Norton and Thevenin equivalents with some facility and to gain some mastery of branch current and/or mesh analysis and/or nodal analysis and the use of matrix methods of simultaneous solutions. And even be able to work out the right numbers every time. But it remains a bit of a pain, too, and one wishes for a "solver" so as to avoid repeating the details over and over, every time someone faces one of these. It's not that you don't know the theory and it's not that you can't sit down with paper and pencil and get useful results. It's just that the details are many and bookkeeping a pain and it's really helpful to just let some computer program do that part for you so that you can focus on the larger design issues and not get mired in calculations that take you away from more important considerations elsewhere. You get more done in less time. But you still could do it, if you had to.
Spice is really good for that. But I don't see it replacing books on theory.
Bob Masta nailed the basic idea, I think. One needs to learn how to recognize blocks, how to design them, and how to adapt them. And even then, Jan Panteltje's comment, "I only am [still only] familiar with a subset," is squarely on the mark, too. One will never know every way someone's knowledge and imagination has already been or might yet be combined. One can only hope to know some. Experience seems to move smarter folks from brazen confidence towards modest diffidence, so that when asked how some designs might be done one will answer that although they may know a few ways, they are sure many more exist which were not only as yet unknown but almost unimaginable.
So maybe I'd rephrase your comment to, "a good way to focus more on learning theory behind electronic design is to use SPICE to free you of mundane calculations you already know something about while giving you a few key answers to well-framed, knowledgeable questions."
That's my hobbyist view, anyway.
Jon
P.S. Also, one thing Spice will NOT do is model reality. Just someone's simplified model of it. So one still needs a lot of practical knowledge and experience.
Referring to point '0a' it is helpfull to see what electrons do in a circuit :-)
--
Failure does not prove something is impossible, failure simply
indicates you are not using the right tools...
"If it doesn\'t fit, use a bigger hammer!"
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IMHO using Spice is a bit of an art in itself. All the components in Spice are ideal but real components aren't. The question is always: is the simulation close enough to reality? Sometimes I even reverse the process to get a simulation that is close to the measured values and start working for there (Spice is great for investigating effects from component tolerances).
A very good way of learning how to use spice it building a simple one stage transistor amplifier while doing the calculations by hand, by Spice and make measurements in the actual circuit. Then move on to a more complicated amplifier with feedback and do the same (including the frequency response!).
--
Failure does not prove something is impossible, failure simply
indicates you are not using the right tools...
"If it doesn\'t fit, use a bigger hammer!"
--------------------------------------------------------------
Ummmmh? IMNSHO, transistor models, particularly MOS devices in an ASIC, are quite well modeled!
Yep. Simulators don't "design".
Nonsense! Drop by sometime and I'll show you my etchings, errrh, uh, libraries ;-)
If absolute tolerances have any major effect on your circuit's performance you're NO designer ;-)
Or hire a pro, such as me ;-)
...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC\'s and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona 85048 Skype: Contacts Only | |
| Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
Postings via gmail, yahoo, hotmail, aioe, uar or googlegroups, and
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Couldn't disagree more. All my best stuff is designed using algebra, optimized analytically, and then (once all the noncritical stuff is added) SPICEd to make sure there are no serious blunders.
As others had said, it's all based on practical experience. You can know all the theory in the world, yet still be a terrible designer.
And you *really* learn electronics when the things you design and/or build *don't* work and you have to troubleshoot them. So here's hoping your next project doesn't work and it's a real !@#$% to troubleshoot!
I design with pencil and vellum and an HP RPN calculator, and rarely use Spice: I already know how a circuit is going to work, since I
*design* it to work. Spice can't design, it can only analyze, so "designing" with Spice is basically random fiddling in a fantasy environment, worse than design by breadboarding. I don't breadboard much, either. Most of my stuff works first time, and we expect to sell revision A boards and usually do.
Spicing an IC can make sense, since masks are so expensive and design iterations are so slow. Spicing a full PC-board-level product is a prodigious waste of time, especially because the part models are usually bad.
Spice is mostly useless for really fast stuff, too.
And the best spice is free. Get LTspice
Sure, things like beta-biasing work great in Spice. Ditto insane power dissipations.
The great inventions of the last century... radio, television, radar, microwaves, nuclear power, transistors, computers, lasers, jet planes, spacecraft... were all developed without Spice.
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