Customer Reviews

DSP-Based Testing of Analog and Mixed-Signal Circuits

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The book provides a rich historical account of the technology boom of a prehistoric silicon valley through the time that the book was written around the mid 1980's. It provides a first hand account of how the earliest test equipment dinosaurs for digital signal processing were tamed.

Therefore, in the context of solving problems related to digital signal processing one might anticipate that the author's information belongs to a bygone era. While that is true, in a different sense it provides the bread crumbs that lead to the original planning diagram for the box that everyone wants to think out of.

That is an accomplishment.

I would like to add these few observations, assuming that the author is never going to rewrite this book; I think that motivational research could be a good field of opportunity. Because when I finished his book, I was so motivated that if my pickup truck could have carried all of those stone tablets I would have taken this book to the semiconductor factory and showed them how it should be done.

Additionally, I enjoyed seeing the cave paintings of the mathematical concepts involved with digital signal processing and the stone carvings of the vacuum tubes were just amazing. However, what was most refreshing was finally finding an author that could explain that cave painting hieroglyphic depicting continuous analog signals. (c)

This book was written in 1987, and many parts of it are still germane. The approach to solving DSP problems, and of testing DSP circuitry are timeless, as long as DSP circuits will exist.

What does need to be updated is text that reflects the massive gains in DSP complexity and speed since then. If anything, the debugging problems are much harder now, due to these hardware advances. In an industrial context, this is important because the Automated Test Equipment field has had to make massive investments in upgrading, to maintain its usefulness.

Overall, you can still find the book useful today, for its problem solving way of thinking.