Analog Circuit Design: A Tutorial Guide to Applications and Solutions 1st Edition

This book is a compilation of Linear Technology's appnotes which are (to my knowledge) largely available for free online. The book mostly deals with analog topics involved in power management and signal conditioning. So why buy the book? In short, because you will have at your finger tips in hardback, a compilation of appnotes that deal with arcane subtleties and nuances of analog design that you will not get in any text written by acadamia, or from any single designer. The depth in practical technical information is not to be found elsewhere.

For one example, the book contains an appnote dealing with the design of a standards lab 20bit DAC. As a related topic of interest, Jim Williams discusses Kelvin Varley dividers. If you do not know what Kelvin Varley dividers are, or why they are useful, this is a good place to start. The topic of Kelvin Varley dividers is just one example of one of the arcane but useful subjects discussed in this book.

The nuances discussed are subtle, and not for the newbie to electronics. But anyone who deals with high performance analog, or precision design (to ppm levels) will find something useful in this text. Even though most of the topics are probably found on Linear's website for free, I give it 5 stars because exposing oneself to the material found in this book, you will begin to learn what exactly world class analog is.

This is a great book!!!!, havent finished reading it, I have read almost half of it, however theres a great deal of useful information here. Some people complain this is a compilation of LT application notes, it may be, however in my case, I just cant read PDF books, so just having everything compiled, organized and nicely printed on an astonishing BIG hardcover book is worth the price alone. This volume is almost 1000 pages, I bought both volumes and the second volume is twice as thick!

Regarding vol. I, the book is divided in two sections, in general, the first section could be described as power electronics or power managment, and the second one would be signal conditioning. The power management section is wonderful, It covers a lot of applications plus some background theory, ranging from powering all sorts of devices like laptops, chargers, telecom systems, lasers, peltier coolers, switch mode and linear power supplies, FPGA boards, etc.... plus theory and application of the main power converters such as buck, cuk, boost, flyback, forward, etc., compensation techniques, inductor design, power supply filters, and so on.

I can honestly tell you that Ive learned more about power management and regulators by reading this pages than what I learned on my power electronic course at college and power electronic books. People complain that its all based in LT devices, and I agree, however, I must say that I always disliked that every power electronics book explains everything in an idealized way, for instance in a buck converter you would see a circuit featuring a "switch" which symbolize another circuit in charge of switching on and off the converter, the problem is that those power electronics books never actually tell you about the circuit that makes the switch, which in fact takes up more than 90% of the entire final circuit in real applications and its the hardest part to get right.

In this book, although using only LT parts, at least I get to see the whats inside the "switch" block, plus how to make the switch, everything starts to make sense since you are now learning about actual circuits, and not just blocks of idealized components. This is at least in my opinon, extremely valuable, and I think that it could be applied to different parts from different manufacturers once you understand the basic principle.

Most of the practical formulas you need are there, without much derivation, but there are several explicit examples on how to use each of them, so I never felt like the authors just took numbers out of the air, since most of the arithmetical procedure is in the examples. You get to see actual oscilloscope pictures, rather than just theoretical graphs and fourier series.

I always felt that there was a real design approach rather than merely an academic approach, for example, authors sometime will calculate components based on analytical formulas, while sometimes they will say something like "The way to calculate this compensation network is by using an RC substitution box and messing around with it, try starting out with this suggested values: xxx".

The book is written in a very light humorous language, not to say that it is not formal and sometimes very convoluted, however theres some very clean and subtle humor that makes you laugh every now and then, making everything more enjoyable. Most of Jim Williams articles are specially good, and funny, I specially liked the one title "Swtiching regulators for poets", Jim has a talent to explain complicated things in a simple way without dumbing it down.

In general, this book is a great buy, if you are into analog design im sure you'll enjoy it!

Yes, the application notes are a somewhat dated. And many can be found in a PDF on the web. So why five stars?
It is nice to have Jim William's ideas consolidated into one static location to leisurely peruse through.
Be forewarned, this is not a college textbook or some other dry dissertation.
Instead, it reads in the tradition of "Jim Williams speak", similar to a good technical discussion among peers or a presentation.
A lot of the book is stating the obvious for the older codgers, but still remains a good source to provide psychological lubrication (Jim William's own words) when bench-racing new ideas.
The younger guys can also appreciate the explanations of measurement techniques and discrete internal architecture, which is generally missing on most of today's highly integrated solutions.
And the hobbyist can easily re-create a lot of the examples..

This book is not for beginners. It assumes some level of knowledge and experience. It has a lot of real world problems and solutions that real EEs used to solve those problems. You'll probably never get to work with EEs of the experience level of Jim Williams, sadly deceased now, or the other fine engineers whose work is in this book. But you can at least soak up some of the thought processes and methodologies.

Some have complained that most of these articles are available for free online, individually. I'm aware of that. However, I like having them all at my fingertips, rather than as a series of unconnected webpages scattered around. In addition, people much more experienced than you or I have selected these as the best.

That said, if you are a beginner, this is still a great investment. The more you learn, the more of this will make sense to you. You'll learn things from this book that you'll never learn from any college textbook.

A serious book for the serious design Engineer. This book does not start with three chapters defining resistors, soldering methods, and "why analog is still important". It assumes you know a lot and want to know more. MY kind of book.

Jim Williams ..he spend entire life for building analog stuff ..who those understand beauty of analog the person only understand Jim Williams and bob ..awesome this book...

This is a very interesting book by one of the recognized experts on analog design and it contains a diverse selection of analog applications.

good book