Textbook recommendation

OK, I get people like this to mentor regularly, their academic background is process control and I've been designing and implementing industrial controls for > 40 years. It takes 2 years of mentoring to get them up to the point where they can handle simple problems autonomously, and very little of their time is spent reading books of any sort. Just about all of what they have to learn isn't in *any* book, it's about judging when to be precise and when to compromise, how to work out what questions to ask, how to utilise and integrate the input of others, how to judge when you've got it good enough, when to copy and when ot innovate, the list goes on.

You might look at "The Circuit Designers Companion" by Tim Williams. An oldish book now (1991). But is specifically intended to cover some of the electronic product design real-world issues typically left out of academic courses.

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John Devereux

Thanks, John! There is a second edition from 2004, which I am looking at now thanks to google books. From a quick look at the contents it looks very promising...

Pere

Also of course the now venerable "Art of Electronics", if you have not already got it.

A classic, it's old now, a new one is due out in a few months. (And has been for the last 10 years but we live in hope...).

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John Devereux

I agree with Bruce. Putting it all together isn't going to come from any book. Once the technical background is absorbed, defining and designing and selling and deploying systems is a complex human activity that can only be learned by doing it for some years.

There *should* be courses on the psychology of electronic design, which would at least hint at what's really involved.

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John Larkin                  Highland Technology Inc 
www.highlandtechnology.com   jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com    

Precision electronic instrumentation 
Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators 
Custom timing and laser controllers 
Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links 
VME  analog, thermocouple, LVDT, synchro, tachometer 
Multichannel arbitrary waveform generators

Actually my EE study included that. If -lets give it a name- 'circuit realisation' isn't part of an EE course I'd get my money back.

--
Failure does not prove something is impossible, failure simply 
indicates you are not using the right tools... 
nico@nctdevpuntnl (punt=.) 
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I get the sense you believe there is an optimal solution to a complex system, which of course there isn't. In my mind, optimal is high reliability, but someone else might want low cost.

Since you are outlining a sampled data system (maybe not in the strict sense but still in practice), you always have to consider what happens between samples. Life is analog, and analog needs to be under control at all times, not just at the sample points.

Optimal is what you can sell, and what works in the real world. Dealing with that isn't very deterministic.

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John Larkin Highland Technology Inc

jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com

Precision electronic instrumentation Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators Custom timing and laser controllers Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links VME analog, thermocouple, LVDT, synchro, tachometer Multichannel arbitrary waveform generators

Sure. I am just looking for some text to help in this process: it does not have to be a general approach -this may not exist. But perhaps there is a nice case study which can be extrapolated.

And it doesn't look like there are many such books out there, suggesting that you might have to ask for your money back at several institutions :)

Pere

LOL! You mean "EE-427 - Practical Spice" doesn't cut it? ;-)

ARM/MIPS)

I surely have AoE! But I am looking more for material for someone who already has had an exposure to the material of AoE and wishes to integrate this into a product. You may know how to design a low-noise amplifier but you have to put this inside a box, perhaps battery powered...

Tim Williams' book looks nice for the "electronics" part. But there are also those nasty system decisions. For instance, where to put the frontiers between Software, Firmware and Hardware. How to these affect development time, power consumption, reliability, performance? How does one learn this -if not by experience? I am actually looking for support material in any of these "systems integration" areas...

Pere

If there isn't an optimal solution, the problem isn't defined well enough.

"Practical Spice" . LOL, that's a good one!

Only trivial problems are defined well enough.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com 

Precision electronic instrumentation 
Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators 
Custom laser drivers and controllers 
Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links 
VME thermocouple, LVDT, synchro   acquisition and simulation

That's certainly not true.

I thought your standard was 'less unsatisfactory'?

Yep, and never underestimate the power of iteration...

How does that old saying go? For every (non-trivial) problem there are

1000 solutions, 100 of those solutions 'work,' and 10 of those are 'good' but none are 'best.'

You people really need to meditate. For instance, an optimal solution would draw no power. Thus no electronic device is optimal. Hence all electronic devices have some compromise.

QED