Trying to understand how to design circuits

I just hate book titles like "Bicycles: a Peddling Approach." And journal article titles containing the word "Novel."

John

This book comes highly recommended:

John

Sno-o-o-o-ort ;-)

...Jim Thompson

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|  James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     |
|  Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
|  Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC\'s and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
|  Phoenix, Arizona            Voice:(480)460-2350  |             |
|  E-mail Address at Website     Fax:(480)460-2142  |  Brass Rat  |
|       http://www.analog-innovations.com           |    1962     |
             
"Winners never quit, quitters never win", Jack Bradley Budnik ~1956

Well, in the last few years, I've designed six or eight different oscillators, all with topologies I've never seen elsewhere. Of course, I can't guarantee that nobody has ever done any of them before. Except two, maybe three, that I'm pretty sure about.

Sure there is. New applications and new components invite new topologies. Besides, inventing new circuits is fun.

I think there's lots of room for, and need for, both new circuits and new product architectures.

John

"Paul Burridge" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

One of the chapters in "The Art & Science of Analog Circuit Design" describes how, for a mercury delay line memory, the "hook up the blocks" approach was unable to provide a working design; designing all the blocks "in paralle" allowed for a very inexpensive solution.

The vast majority of engineers out there are of the "hook up the blocks" variety; it is much easier than designing the blocks themselves!

Hook, Line and Sinker.......

Merry Whatever's

martin

Could you have picked a more complicated example? No one in their right mind would look at that archaic thing as an elemental building block from a circuits point of view. You might have explained its decomposition into more fundamental component circuits.

There is no short answer. There are two books available that tackle this very question at the entry level: Electronics: A Systems Approach , Storey and Gateway to Electronics, Dunn

Stuff snipped

this

I was going to suggest "The Feng Shui of Electronics" by Pau Horowiti and Wan Hio

Barrie Gilbert did a chapter in Jim Williams' first (1991) Analog Circuit Design book[1], where he talks about this very issue, "Where do little circuits come from?" Highly recommended, his bit and the whole book.

John

[1] my copy of which, improbably, is autographed by Bob Pease.

It is, its:

1 Replication (copying) 2 Randam variation 3 Selection

Thats it mate. End of story.

Ho humm... I have explained this many times, as I am sure you know, but to refresh,

check out the "Electronic Engineer as a Darwinian machine" bit.

Sorry to bust your bubble John, but that *is* the way it is, and the method is very profitable. Indeed, its essentially the only way to make profit.

The problem here is that people like to lie to themselves. You need to stand back and understand what it is one really does, not what one would like to believe they do.

I design *new* products every day. I do it using the same *old* components like diff pairs, cascodes, folded cascades, push pull stages etc that were invented at the beginning of electronics. It will always be that way. Don't kid yourself any different, but please do let me know when you invent a ultracascideconduit.

Completely pointless.

Kevin Aylward snipped-for-privacy@anasoft.co.uk

SuperSpice, a very affordable Mixed-Mode Windows Simulator with Schematic Capture, Waveform Display, FFT's and Filter Design.

Those books are not for you, they are for beginners, written well and comprehensive, more like surveys than textbooks, although they do contain problem sets.

I can't agree with that, Tim. Joining up the dots between a block diagram is the easy bit. What have you got to factor in? Signal levels and source and load impedances and that's about it. Designing the blocks themselves at component level is the really clever bit IMV.

--

"What is now proved was once only imagin\'d" - William Blake

How much design is truly novel nowadays? I mean, if you want an oscillator - to take just one example - there are loads of eponymous configurations to choose from, mostly dating from 60+ years ago. Other staples have likewise been refined and settled over the decades. The only 'design' as such remaining to be done is hooking up the various sub-circuit elements, AFAICS. There's no point in re-inventing the wheel, so how often does a currently working designer actually sit down and truly design/develop a totally novel configuration?

--

"What is now proved was once only imagin\'d" - William Blake

I can't sit by and see such a grave injustice go answered. If the regular designers here are guilty of *anything* it's only forgetting how tough a subject this is to get to grips with adequately. There are plenty of demonstrably genuine experts here. I smell a troll hereabouts...

Rubbish. It's one of the very best! Like I said: a troll.

--

"What is now proved was once only imagin\'d" - William Blake

I just ignore the silly response from the oldies like them.

I recommends reading many good electronics books and learn about basic thing such as transistor, resistor and capacitor. The important thing is to spend time experimenting and interacting with electronics and see the response. The shopping list includes soldering irons, scope, PSU (battery is cheaper but don't last long) and digital voltmeter (DVM). There is maplins 200:1 electronics kits which give you very good start. You can get equipment cheaply from ebay but don't expects perfect accuarcy or performance, but you still get out from them.

The book need to be easy to following with simple equation to start with. Once you understand the basic equation and theory, you can advance into op-amp and feedback levels. Then you progress into more complex domains such as ADC, DAC and serial interface. You could start involving Microchip PIC and C programming but don't let this dent you or being afriad of it. Once you done this you can declare yourself as designer engineer(!) which would turn your dream into wonderful realities(!).

All this is more like investment of your skill and treat as part of hobbies, otherwise you simply walk away, watch TV and drink beers or popcorns and hope to die knowing nothing.

I work as Analogue Design Engineer and earning nice income from it, I do hobby from time to time in embedded design engineer because that is where digital meet analogue.

Hope this help...

Good luck.

Riscy

I wouldn't. The path you describe works fine if you want to be a board level or digital designer, but there's no getting away from a decent dose of math and knowledge of some fairly sophisticated device models if you're looking to design to build those "small blocks" like Jim Thompson, Winfield Hill, and others do.

Knowing how to interface an ADC or DAC over a serial interface is arguably trivial compared to having an in-depth understanding of op-amps and feedback.

Granted, for every Jim or Win out there there are probably 1,000 or more "block level" design engineers, and the number is increasing all the time. Still, it's important to have a decent idea of "what I know" vs. "what _is_ there to know?" I.e., you should have some vague idea as to just how little you know. :-) Personally, I know that I couldn't begin to design a lot of the stuff that those "oldies" can!

There are, of course, a large number of exceedingly good replies (from well known and exceedingly good engineers) amongst the noise of some trolling.

I look at design as where art and technology meet. One must have an understanding (indeed, an intimate knowledge) of the fundamental theory, but there is a huge amount of art in any non-trivial design. How do I decide just which method I am going to use? Large parts of experience, and lots of bouncing ideas around in my head to figure out just what is going to work for me *in this situation*. It's rather like painting a picture - what am I trying to portray or achieve with this exercise? Ultimately, that's what leads me to 'put a resistor there, choose that diode here' .

As someone said, all designs are tradeoffs (and that's true whether they are digital or analog) for various factors.

Even apparently simple designs may have been considered for quite a while (one might argue that the simpler [more elegant] the design *for a given task*, the more difficult it was to design, but ultimately more satisfying to the designer).

That said, there is no 'method to design' that would work for everyone

- that's why I consider the design side an art, not a technology - we

*use* technology, we live design [well, I do ;) ]. Of course, we also design the original technologies on occasion ;) On other occasions we study it to understand it so we may modify and use it. (There must be a recursive in there somewhere...).

Cheers

PeteS

chriswilliams wrote:

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Now who is laughing