41–50 of 98 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interestingly, a lot of the parts discussed are still in wide use today. Much of the concepts are necessary for understanding circuits and how they work.
Some of the parts discussed are probably in wide use because they are mentioned in AoE. The uA741 effect.
I learned from the 1st edition, back in 1983, when I took the electronics course for physics majors. I think it's the best textbook I've ever used, in any subject. I fell in love with analog electronics. Note my HN user name. ;-) What's happened with analog since then? I believe that opto-electronics is much more important today, as are switchmode circuits. Some things, like systematic noise budgeting, will never go…
What happened? Digital and moore's law took over. The microprocessor continues to absorb every function that, at one point, made economical sense to do in the analog domain. I share your lament, but reality instructs us to condition signals and supply voltage properly, and let the micro take it from there. It's only going to become more true as time moves on, so learn programming. Get very good at it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What happened? Digital and moore's law took over. The microprocessor continues to absorb every function that, at one point, made economical sense to do in the analog domain. I share your lament, but reality instructs us to condition signals and supply voltage properly, and let the micro take it from there. It's only going to become more true as time moves on, so learn programming. Get very good at it.
I am too young to have been there for the digital vs analog debate, but I understand that things being digital was not always obvious. The reason digital won is because, very crudely, to double the precision of a digital circuit you just give it wider registers (scale horizontally), while to double the precision of an analog circuit you have to more than double the precision of every component of the system (scale ve…
The way to deal with that in the analog world is an expensive process called 'trimming' where you use adjustable components to get you where you want to be. But trimming makes the circuitry sensitive to being bounced around and makes it more sensitive to temperature changes if you use the cheap version and the expensive version (digital circuitry masquerading as trimmable analog components) puts the horse behind the cart if you wanted analog then you're no longer getting it (but some kind of quantized version of analog).
For some circuits this is all more important than for others.
Finally, digital reduces the component count and so increases reliability and decreases cost. Software is hard to make and expensive but once you have it the marginal cost of reproduction is next to zero.
Digital, once the bugs are worked out has none of these issues and so lends itself much more to economic mass production.
This is offtopic, but I need to ask this question and I fear I may loose the opportunity to field it to this audience of experts. I'm interested in two things and am wondering if this book, or something else, would be of use to me. Assume I have strong math background, and assume I understand the Maxwell equations. What book/resource provides a good understanding of the approximations (from first principles) needed t…
The Art of Electronics will not help you for simulation, it's a very good practical manual for analogue electronics design. It'll help you understand how a circuit works, but electrical engineers rarely need to solve Maxwell's equations when designing a circuit. It's not a bad idea to read through it however, I can't see many situations where you'd immediately dive into EM simulation without understanding how the circuit works first.
Can someone with no electronics background at all pick up this book? If not what would be a good prerequisite book?
I took the Physics 123 class at Harvard, from which this book developed from the original course notes, and uses this as the textbook (the class is still taught by Horowitz who has encyclopediac knowledge of electronics and Hayes who replaced Hill when he left Harvard. These guys also wrote the accompanying lab manual which I also highly recommend). You had all sorts of non-scientific people in the class.
To give some context, one semester is split into two halves. The first half covers analog electronics, and ends with a lab where the whole class designed and built a system to take analog audio signal, pulse-width modulate it to an IR transmitter, broadcast across the room to another receiver circuit that demodulates, amplifies, and plays it. Designed by students that originally never knew what a resistor or transistor was.
Second half is all digital, starts with glue logic and ends with the building of a breadboard computer (68008, the 8-bit external bus flavor of 68008). We'd write assembly programs into an EEPROM and program it to do all kinds of things. Again, students that had no idea what a NAND gate was nor ever wrote a line of code.
Ah, do they mean April 1st?
This is offtopic, but I need to ask this question and I fear I may loose the opportunity to field it to this audience of experts. I'm interested in two things and am wondering if this book, or something else, would be of use to me. Assume I have strong math background, and assume I understand the Maxwell equations. What book/resource provides a good understanding of the approximations (from first principles) needed t…
For the 2nd, you really need to get into solid state physics if you want to understand the details of CMOS, which entails some requisite knowledge of both quantum mechanics and statistical mechanics/thermodynamics. Maxwell's equations alone won't cut it.
I learned from the 1st edition, back in 1983, when I took the electronics course for physics majors. I think it's the best textbook I've ever used, in any subject. I fell in love with analog electronics. Note my HN user name. ;-) What's happened with analog since then? I believe that opto-electronics is much more important today, as are switchmode circuits. Some things, like systematic noise budgeting, will never go…
What happened? Digital and moore's law took over. The microprocessor continues to absorb every function that, at one point, made economical sense to do in the analog domain. I share your lament, but reality instructs us to condition signals and supply voltage properly, and let the micro take it from there. It's only going to become more true as time moves on, so learn programming. Get very good at it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What happened? Digital and moore's law took over. The microprocessor continues to absorb every function that, at one point, made economical sense to do in the analog domain. I share your lament, but reality instructs us to condition signals and supply voltage properly, and let the micro take it from there. It's only going to become more true as time moves on, so learn programming. Get very good at it.
Upvoted. I definitely agree that many erstwhile "analog" functions have joined the dark side. ;-) And I've been programming digital / analog systems since the early 80s. But I think that two challenges / opportunities remain for analog. The first is that advances in digital capabilities place new demands on analog. For instance, the possibility of higher sampling rates and bit depths requires us to go back and update…