What's the Toughest Branch in Electronics?

What's the Toughest Branch in Electronics?

Examples: Smps design (switchers for..everything!) Audio design (power amplifiers, analogue filters) RF design (radio transmitters, receivers, radar, cellphones) Digital design (computers,microcontrollers,FPGA)

I'll guess this order of difficulty.

1) RF design 2) Smps design 3) Audio design 4) Digital design

D from BC

Reply to
D from BC
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Probably information theory followed by robust control, then digital signal processing.

Hardy

Reply to
HardySpicer

Secure communications. Wired or RF, digital or analog.

Modern chip epitaxy.

Reply to
ChairmanOfTheBored

Information theory...is that classed as electronics? What components do I use? Are there inforesistors and infotransistors? :P

Now it's not easy to make a DSP chip in a garage but I think all the bulk of the thinking is in the software/firmware. Question is...can software be considered electronics too? D from BC

Reply to
D from BC

You mean like encryption? Frequency hopping and Spread Spectrum..that sort of thing.. It must be tough to listen in on a conversation if a link is hopping

15 unknown carrier frequencies in a pseudo random fashion.

Alternatively, the low tech way was done in the movie "Windtalkers".

D from BC

Reply to
D from BC

I'll say RF. The higher in frequency you go,the harder it gets.(atleast for the "Average Joe".)

Lots of HAM's seem to get up into the Ghz range pretty commonly.. I just wonder how much of that is actual "homebrew" equipment,versus commercially made stuff.

10Ghz would be a serious challenge,to a guy in the garage with a soldering iron..hell,a few hundred Mhz is tricky business,unless you've got of bit of a 'clue' about what you're doing.
Reply to
PhattyMo

Smps design is RF design with diodes on the output side. You'd have to break the topics down a little differently as in perhaps microwave electronics design and high powered RF.

You just have to put in the red LEDs to get that "tube glow" and audio is easy. Op-amps are now so good that very little of the audio subject is hard any more.

You missed analog data acquisition. Getting high dynamic ranges at highish speeds isn't easy.

Reply to
MooseFET

You could also have a different view on it.

1) the field you know 2) the field you believe to know 3) the field you don't know

can be translated to

1) there are many problems that can be solve with work and time, you can hardly pay your bills 2) Some guys you heard of working there are making buckets of cash with trivialities 3) cool stuff, being ahead of the crowd and there you can eventually become rich rather quick

Rene

--
Ing.Buero R.Tschaggelar - http://www.ibrtses.com
& commercial newsgroups - http://www.talkto.net
Reply to
Rene Tschaggelar

"D from BC"

** The one you have been successfully grazing on for decades - when some *asshole* starts in sawing it right off at the damn trunk !!!!

....... Phil

Reply to
Phil Allison

If you do a degree in Elec/Electronic Eng you will study some information theory. Components and building hardyware is only a small part of an electronic system. You need to also sort out the theory as well. This is a professionals job of course and rarely of interest to amatuer electronics builders.

Hardy

Reply to
HardySpicer

You've obviously never looked at the IEEE transactions on anything!

Reply to
HardySpicer

Nothing fundamentally difficult about secure comms these days. Review the literature, choose an algorithm that has been in widespread use for a few years without significant vulnerabilitys beig found and use plenty of key bits.

The problems of things like WEP have arrisen due to system designers a)ignoring the principles that the cryptographers have spent years working out such as keeping the algorithm secret only helps short term and algorithms created by people who havn't spent twenty years learning cryptoanalysis usually turn out to be insecure. and b) cuting down the crypto to fit the amount of processing and battery power available. Technology has moved on to the point that should not be a problem anymore.

Bob

Reply to
Bob

Audio design. Nothing else is remotely as involved in the details at the limits of current science/technology. The basic electronic design is not so arduous but from there the development becomes increasingly more time consuming if the requirements of the true audiophile are to be met. For example whilst it is well established in the audio world that hand soldering all components with 60/40 RA fluxed solder produces a more 'rounded' sound to the recordings of orchestral works made on a thursday afternoon, it required years of research to add a 'vibrant cleaness' to the sound by ensuring the solder resist was green and manufactured by someone wearing red socks. Even as I write the purity of the sound from CD and DVD players using lasers with a bandwidth greater than 1pico metre is being questioned.

Reply to
RHRRC

Do you have an example or two for us?

Reply to
Winfield

Do you mean "some IC designer"? That happens: things you used to design are now ICs, or even just a snippet of VHDL. All you can really do is accept it and move up the abstraction stack. We're putting stuff on boards that used to be racks, that used to be buildings.

John

Reply to
John Larkin

D also missed the most important one: Marketing.

Whether your are on your own like me and must market yourself or build something and must market that. There has to be a solid market, the design must be a glove fit for that market, and the masses out there must become informed about your miracle designs ;-)

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com
Reply to
Joerg

The toughest branch of electronics is making money. I.e. solving the problems directly related to making money: production, sales, quality, support, supplies, liabilities, etc.

All of that are the minor technical difficulties.

VLV

Reply to
Vladimir Vassilevsky

In other words, it's hard to design things when the specifications are based on whim, fashion, and caprice, rather than, say, measurements or even basic physics. For instance, your 1 picometre wavelength laser would be emitting gamma rays of 1.24 MeV, which would be an odd way of improving a CD player.

On the plus side, if you're good at BS, you can successfully prevent many suckers from keeping their money. On the minus side, you lose your honesty and self-respect--though from your post, it doesn't sound as though there's much left anyway.

Cheers,

Phil Hobbs

Reply to
Phil Hobbs

I think info theory is upstream (if that makes sense) from hardware. In other words, sounds like something that's thought about in order to create the appropriate hardware.

But isn't that like saying math is electronics? Since math is used to express electronics (ex: spice?) does that make math an electronics category? You mentioned information theory...I'm sure it's math based. D from BC

Reply to
D from BC

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