Electrical Engineering Texts?

"John Larkin" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

I'm thinking that's the one that also ended up as a commercially published book, "Op Amp Applications Handboook" by Walt Jung

Some of my own suggestions:

"Audio/Radio Handbook" by National Semiconductor -- Somewhat dated (the likelihood anyone one is designing new casette recorders seems pretty remote), but it's just fascinating to read of the methods used back when magnetic tape, linear power amplifiers for stereos, and analog modulation schemes for wireless were king. "An Analog Electronics Curiosity Cabinet" by Eric Miller -- Lots of very practical information for lab work "The Circuit Designer's Companion," by Tim Williams (but not the one who hangs out here on SED) -- This is aimed more at technicians than designers, I think, but of note it contains a lot of useful material about heat management, EMC, product safety/testing, and PCB fabrication that you don't typically learn in school. "RF Circuit Design," by Chris Bowick -- A very practical introduction to building RF gadgets, written by Bowick when he was still back designing cable TV widgets at Scientific Atlanta (...these days he's semi-retired but happy to be a consultant...). "Introduction to Radio Frequency Design," by Wes Hayward -- Another excellent book, with more emphasis on lower frequency (HF) vs. Bowick's book. "Experimental Methods in RF Design," by Wes Hayward, Rick Campbell, etc. -- Sort of an expansion of the above, with additional authors brought in to broaden the scope. Not as mathematically rigorous, but still much more some than the oft-cited ARRL handbook. "Transistor Circuit Techniques: Discrete and Integrated," by Gordon Ritchie -- This is an introductory textbook from the UK market (and the "Integrated" part in the title really only means that, yeah, one can build diff amps in ICs just as well as one can out of discretes... but it doesn't discuss symmetry or ratioing or all the other tricks that IC designers really use). What I like about it is that it's rather more practical at times than, e.g., Sedra & Smith or Horwitz & Hill: You typically end up with complete circuits, rather than just, e.g., the small-signal part of a circuit where adding the biasing and what-not is left as an exercise for the reader. "Switching Power Supply Design," by Abraham Pressman (the 3rd edition is co-authored by a couple other guys, as Pressman is unfortunately no longer with us): A good but comprehensive introduction to switching power supply design. It's rather dated -- 100kHz is kinda his standard switching frequency! -- but still quite good and more in-depth than many tomes written more recently.

---Joel

"Hot Air Rises and Heat Sinks: Everything You Know About Cooling Electronics Is Wrong" by Tony Kordyban is worth a read to discover just how much of thermal management is done largely empirically anyway. :-)

Also for the op-amps list:

"Intuitive IC Op Amps," by Thomas Frederiksen: Quite comprehensive and very practical with lots of example circuits

Watching the empirical development is fascinating.

Laird Pettit (Chief Mechanical Engineer at GenRad, Phoenix) would build clear plastic models of an enclosure, complete with component shape mock-ups, fans, etc., then run a smoke generator and watch the air flow. ...Jim Thompson

Particularly page 14 :-)

Tom was my cubicle mate in the early days of Motorola SPD. ...Jim Thompson

-- | James E.Thompson, CTO | 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

Remember: Once you go over the hill, you pick up speed

"Jim Thompson" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

"Therefore, this current mirror connection is also known as a differential-to-single-ended converter. This is believed to have been first used in a linear IC in 1996 by James E. Thompson."

Well, there you have it -- any minute now we'll have someone on here claim they used it first. :-)

Any idea what he's up to these days?

Hmm... I'm noticing he had a bunch of other books, e.g., "Intuitive Analog Electrnoics: From Electron to Op Amp." I wonder if there's much new material there?

"Simplified Modern Filter Design" Philip R. Geffe

You typo'd--------------^^^^--- should be 1966 :-)

Most likely Larkin :-)

I last chatted with Tom about ten years ago. One of my clients in San Jose happened to know his home phone number. We only had a quick catch-up...he was on #2 wife :-) He was trimming broken branches from a bad wind storm, so our call was short :-(

Don't know. ...Jim Thompson

All the books you bought for any technical class from your 2nd year on. After that, I second the recommendation for the ARRL Handbook.

Yep, I have that, too. Ugly, isn't he ?:-) ...Jim Thompson

-- | James E.Thompson, CTO | 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

Remember: Once you go over the hill, you pick up speed

I have that one. Don't much like it.

John

Too elementary or too much HoJo-esque hand-waving for you?

I have this one too, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone except the mathematically challenged. The information density is too low, and the humour isn't good enough to carry the book.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

age

nics

Oh it's no tomb! But it's a fun one night read. I wish I'd read it before we designed our own heat sinks and put the fins too close. Make mistakes or read about someone else's mistakes... There should be more mistakes published... now trying to think of my own personal howler.

I did blow up a ~$350 (1980 $'s) diode microwave switch the very first time I hooked it up... Backwards!!

Oh, (still in grad school) I changed a vapor cooled probe to one that lived in vacuum and was cooled by a He4 pot*. Where previously all the electical leads were cooled in the He vapor, they now lived in vacuum and conducted an amazing amount of heat down into my pot. I had to cut all the SS tubes in half and install a conducting section.

George H.

I'm designing a laser controller soon, with a CPU and an FPGA deciding when to fire the beast. They tell me that, if the targets stop showing up but I don't fire it often enough anyhow, the PA stage will get over-pumped and blow up. That could cost a megabuck. Or maybe they said a megabuck per hour. It sort of doesn't matter, I guess.

John

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tronics

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Hmm PA is preamp? Pumped amplifier? Sounds like it needs 'dummy' target to shoot at when nothing else is around. I'd worry a lot if a mistake would cost a million. Worse would be something on a satellite or ballon launch.

George H.

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Electronics

Come to think of it, I've worked on three MOPA lasers recently. MOPA = master oscillator/power amplifier, actually an old ham radio term.

The idea is that you make a small, high quality seed laser and run it through a pumped high-power output amp. Two of "my" systems are solid state, where the seed runs continuously at some relatively high rate (960 Hz for NIF, tens of MHz for a mode-locked, picosecond, free-running seed laser) and the PAs are optically pumped, flashtubes for NIF and semiconductor lasers for the other thing. One system is a small (like, 8 foot long) pulsed CO2 seed and a big (like, townhouse sized) RF pumped CO2 PA. All these things have EOM (electro-optic) and AOM (acoustic-optic) attenuators to steer the beams and tune amplitudes.

What they have in common is that, if you pump the PA and don't whack it with a seed pulse often enough, and it builds up enough energy to lase by itself, it can blow itself up in various ways. PA media gains are enormous. So if I make some teensy weensy little timing error, it can cost kilobucks to megabucks. And they still want to negotiate on price.

Yes, they often need "beam dumps" to send the energy into if we have to fire the laser to get rid of excess pump energy, but the customer doesn't want the pulse. Startup and shutdown can both be messy.

John

Never met Geffe, although, a work mate took a lecture session given by him once. Great book for explaining how a simple LC filter works and good intro to scaling. Wish my profs would have read his book before trying to teach filter design.

John Lark>Amazing how long it took them

Well, Intel had the 8088 ready in 1979. The IBM PC was released in August 1981. Motorola didn't appreciate the utility of an 8-bit (external) CPU with a wider internal layout and didn't get their necked-down chip out until 1982.

As you like to point out about all the still-in-R&D stuff, don't even bother with vaporware announcements; wait until the parts are actually in stock somewhere.