Customer Reviews

Analog Circuit Design: Art, Science and Personalities (EDN Series for Design Engineers)

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Analysis is a science: there's a right answer out there, and we can all agree when it's found. Troubleshooting is the same way: when the broken bit is found and fixed, the circuit starts working properly.

Design, on the other hand, is an art; there's always more than one way to do it, and the individuality of the designer has a strong influence on the way the design turns out: hence "Art, Science, and Personalities".

This isn't to say that a good designer does unusual things without a good reason, or adds expensive bells and whistles because he happens to like them. What it means is that for designs that are not routine, the designer's personality has a lot to do with how it comes out.

To become an expert designer, you need a well-developed technical taste. Once you have a design that works at some level, it's that sour feeling in the back of your mouth that will tell you that it isn't right yet, that it can be simpler, cheaper, or more reliable. There aren't a lot of other sources of that information.

Arts are taught by apprenticeship. But where are you going to go to get taught this stuff nowadays? EE departments are going more and more to software, as shown by the vast number of graduate EEs who don't know which end of a soldering iron to hold. Jim Williams can't be everybody's mentor, but in this informal (and sometimes whimsical) book, he and his friends show us how the best analogue designers in the business go about things. You know what? One of the most important elements in the art of design is *play*.

Maybe listening in on these guys playing at being analogue designers isn't quite the same as sitting elbow-to-elbow with them, but it's as close as most of us are going to get, and it's terrifically valuable. I recommend this book to anyone who wants to become a better analogue designer, and who is not easily put off by whimsy in technical writing. (I find it refreshing and fun, myself.) I've owned this book for 6 or 7 years, and it's about ready to fall apart from rereading.

For people who are not already into analog design, this book only mystifies the subject further. It presents analog design with an aura of eccentricity and a feeling of more artistry than engineering. This is an eclectic collection of articles, but among them there are a few gems. Paul Brokaw's description of linear IC design is by far the best exposition I've seen. Jim Williams' Zoo Circuit makes interesting reading into the mind of the designer.

There is a lot of good information contained within this book from the many contributing authors. You can learn a lot of little "tricks" to help you in circuit design. However, many of the contributors get a little carried away with their own personal histories and design biases. I would like to have seen a few more of the design methods and ideas, that the authors have learned over the years, included in the book. Most of the authors are straigth forward in their design philosophies and explanations. However, some of the authors spend pages talking about how, "...they don't even own a computer, much less use it for design...," type of philosophies. This is just plain arrogance on the part of the author and does not help the reader. If the author had used the same page to talk more about how he optimizes a circuit's design, the book would have received a much higher mark from me. Overall, it's not a bad book despite these small shortcomings.

The chapters of this book, written by different authors, don't constitute so much a "how YOU can become a legendary analog designer" as they do "how I became a legendary analog designer". And that's a good thing. A cookbook that can make every reader a guru in any subject, analog circuit design in this case, just isn't going to happen. Seeing what worked for other people, and being able to ferret out the common threads with how their own brain works, will help the potential analog designer spot approaches that resonate with his or her own skills, and perhaps figure out their own personal path to expert level. Not everyone will, or can, reach the level these authors reached; they are all exceptional. But if just a little bit of understanding of what they they've done and how they did it rubs off, then this book will have served the reader well. But if you expect that reading it will make you a guru, you'll likely be disappointed.

I especially enjoyed Chapter 17, Richard Burwyn's "How to Design Analog Circuits without a Computer or a Lot of Paper" because it smacks of practicality and parsimony. It describes practical methods and a relatively small number of things to memorize that'll save you loads of time later. But there are many good chapters -- for example, I got a much better understanding of how several common IC circuits *really* work (e.g., the Gilbert cell) after reading the chapters written by their inventors. Most people will like a few chapters a lot, and others not so much -- but it'll be different chapters for different people.

I first encountered this book at my company's library several years ago, then after I left there, bought a copy for myself and recently, a copy for a friend. It's not a perfect book, but I think most people will find at least a few things in it that will make reading it worth their time.

you into Analog ? You got to have this book. Its a tribute to the LEGENDS. Legends that ever were, that ever will be. My boyhood favourite of almost 10 years. Dont miss it on the analog shelf. I would deem it blasphemy.

I agree completely with the reviewer from SLC: there are some interesting insights, but too much ego invested in personal memoirs and irrelevant anecdotes of personal history.

This is a great book to help you understand Analog engineers - I recruit them for an IC design company and am impressed how smart they are - this book gives you an idea of their depth...

... was the asking price for Philbrick's P2 amplifier module. It started out [...] in 1960 but demand was too strong. So they upped the price[...]. Discover the inside story behind why this little brick with a mere 7 transistors defied replication by competitors in the instrumentation field for so long. This story is indeed the stuff of legends, told to us by Bob Pease who worked with the original designer of the P2, Bob Malter. Spellbinding for us analogue geeks, and just one absorbing chapter of this wide-ranging book.