Which university produces good analog EEs?

A friend of mine got his BSEE from UC Davis and got his Master's from the University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign, and from his Friendster profile, it looks like he's an Analog IC Design Engineer at Intel.

Michael

IC design is not such a problem. Lots of jobs but also many candidates. Board level looks very dire. Not nearly that many jobs but the number of candidates is almost zilch. One client of mine searched for over a year until they found a good one. Along the road we tried out a few but they didn't work out.

I work with a couple of good analog cats, but we have a saying that we are the dinosaurs of our time...most of us over 60 and getting ready to kick back and enjoy the dollars we put into the retirement fund, never knowing that some day we would actually use it.

The problem is chicken and egg...back when we were going to school in the

Then the computer took over and the old analog professors were shunted aside in favor of those who spoke binary as a native language. Analog was shunted aside until those who were destined to become professors at that college never knew the joy of building micropower transmitters or who learned which end of the soldering iron got hot. If you've got no analog talent on staff, you won't turn out any talented analog students.

My advice? Go down the list of ham radio licensees and when you get to one that says: "Trustee for the XYZ University Amateur Radio Club" call up the engineering department of XYZ and ask them who the faculty advisor for the ham club is. Odds are you will get silence or "Oh, that club folded years ago" as the answer. If you actually find a working club, talk to the faculty advisor and ask how many students are in the club. If there are a dozen or more, you've at least found yourself a prospective school.

My guess is that you won't find enough to count on both hands.

Jim

Now-a-days, how does a kid build anything of their own? Where do they get parts?

I remember when Radio Shack, Allied, and Lafayette were primarily part bins ;-)

...Jim Thompson

Ebay.. it's like an infinite basement, I put all my stuff in there, and take out what I need...

Mark

My personal part bins include chips from the '60's ;-)

...Jim Thompson

Get them the same place I get them now. Take apart discarded electronics.

Al

Wait until one of you needs nursing facility care. Then you hear a huge lengthy slurp and all those saving are taostissimo. Gone. I know, because we volunteer and much of that with the elderly. Many of them go from affluent to welfare within a few years. It's sad.

Ah, then I must have been rich. Had two 6164. Special edition with graphite plates no less.

And the ones who really know the tricks are probably in emeritus standing, meaning >>60. I've tried that route a few times :-(

Digikey!

Man, if we'd had a place like that in the 70's .... but, no, you took your bicycle and 5-10 miles later arrived at the local electronics outlet. There you had to rummage through what they had and make do with whatever was in the bins. I remember when I did 1.5hrs roundtrip for one BFY90 RF transistor. They didn't have any. Had to come back the week after, another 1.5hrs. Had to fix the chain on the way there because it had snapped.

And it's better than ever. I mean, where on earth would we have gotten laser diodes back then? Or even big toroid cores? Now you take an old PC off your neighbor's hands for free and he even saves disposal fees. Inside is a smattering of wonderful parts.

Actually getting parts is now probably easier and cheaper than it has ever been, with ebay and lots of online catalogues. People also discard things now that as kids any of us would have been very pleased to dismantle, and some of us still do.

Getting datasheets is also much easier for hobbyists since the internet took off. I remember having to make long journeys to a library that had some datasheets on microfilm, then paying quite a lot of money to have them printed off, and the whole process of getting one datasheet could take a day of my time, even if I was lucky and it was one of the datasheets that they had.

Chris

Hell yeah wrt datsheets. Here in NZ in the 80's it was a real PITA. semiconductor reps charged a lot for databooks, unless you were a big customer. Intel was particularly bad. Back when I was a tech, it was prohibitously expensive to get databooks, around $50 each. Luckily I had a cousin who worked for Nat Semi, he sent me a big box of databooks (I still have the analog apps book).

of course the internet does have a 6-month half life, but hard drive storage is essentially free.

Cheers Terry

Until you hear that telltale high-pitched whine, followed by an awful screech.

I have several large USB hard drives for "backup". hopefully they wont all break simultaneously.

Cheers Terry

As long as they don't share a power rail and are protected from spikes that should be a good strategy. Still, one copy should go off-site.

Try out Montana State and the University of Colorado.

Cheers,

Phil Hobbs

Joerg wrote: [..snip...]

Don't you work in the biomedical electronics industry? There are several universities with degree programs in this particular field. The curriculum for this concentration requires serious course work in several of the applied sciences, biophysics, and the supporting measurement technology, analog and mixed signal. Graduates of these programs are generally superior to the mass produced poorly educated riffraff of the unfocussed EE programs that lack context, mostly bit-heads; I wouldn't hire them to take out the garbage.

Thanks, that's a start. I just fear that guys who've lived in places like that would not enjoy Bay Area life (I wouldn't). But definitely worth a try.

We have a pretty good biomed program at UC Davis here in town. I've worked with biomed engineers and they sure are a smart bunch. However, most of them are not hardcore analog guys who can squeeze the last dB of NF out of a jelly-bean transistor.

I came from the other direction, RF. Slipped into biomed by coincidence, it wasn't planned. My former room mate's mom went to market and back in those days they wrapped lettuce in newspaper. She unpacked it at home and there was an ad by Squibb Medical (seriously). I would have never seen it because it was in their local paper. Small ultrasound department, very independent from the big pharmaceutical organization. So I interviewed and started there because I like smaller companies.