Flicking through modern text books for undergraduate students, I find it startling that little seems to have changed in the way of electronic design. Can anyone think of obvious examples? Regards, Larry.

Perhaps you need some newer text books? :) I guess textbooks teach the "fundamentals", which indeed do not change. But there have been enormous changes in the *practice* of electronics. Obvious ones would be - the transition to surface mount for most applications. - ubiquity of cheap, powerful microcontrollers. Meaning more and more of the functionality of a design is software. - Complete subsystems now available as single-chip "building blocks", e.g. A/D convertors that connect direct to transducers, digital isolators, power supply sequencers. - low cost or free development tools for microcontrollers. No more $5k in-circuit emulators or logic analysers. - easy, online searching and availability of information, samples and production parts. Etc etc -- John Devereux

The most important changes in electronic design over the past 25 years?

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Nico Coesel 13 years ago

Same here but you have to admit that getting information has become a lot easier.

Failure does not prove something is impossible, failure simply indicates you are not using the right tools... nico@nctdevpuntnl (punt=.) --------------------------------------------------------------

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Jim Thompson 13 years ago

I don't know. I used to get databooks hand-delivered to me by salesmen. ...Jim Thompson

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langwadt 13 years ago

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google is much faster, databooks are more a pass time when you have to "sit down" ;)

-Lasse

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Jim Thompson 13 years ago

The old databooks actually showed real schematics, so you could know quickly what the chip could really do. (And I use the old databook schematics to create accurate Spice models... I'm so old I still have transistor models for those old processes ;-) ...Jim Thompson

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krw 13 years ago

I still do. The only ones I keep are .pdfs. Everything else goes in the garbage. I do warn them, though.

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Phil Hobbs 13 years ago

No doubt about that. The databooks get used about 1% as often as PDFs.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Dr Philip C D Hobbs Principal Consultant ElectroOptical Innovations LLC Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 160 North State Road #203 Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 USA +1 845 480 2058 hobbs at electrooptical dot net http://electrooptical.net

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The most important changes in electronic design over the past 25 years?

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