TABLE OF CONTENTS This chapter serves as an introduction to the philosophy and topical coverage of this book. A very brief history of transistor development, invention of the analog integrated circuit (IC) and operational amplifier advances are given.
There is an inexorable trend in recent years to go digital in other words, to do more and more signal processing in the digital domain due to a purported design flexibility. However, the world is an analog place and the use of analog processing allows electronic circuits to interact with the physical world. Not discounting the importance of digital signal processing (DSP) and other digital techniques, there are many analog building blocks such as operational amplifiers, transistor amplifiers, comparators, A/D and D/A converters, phase-locked loops and voltage references (to name just a few) that are still used and will be used far into the future. Therefore, there is a continuing need for course development and education covering basic and advanced principles of analog circuit design.
One reason why analog electronic circuit design is so interesting is the fact that it encompasses so many different disciplines. Here s a partial shopping list, in no particular order, of disciplines encompassed by the broad field of analog circuit design:
Analog filters: Discrete or ladder filters, active filters, switched capacitor filters, crystal filters.
Audio amplifiers: Power op-amps, output (speaker driver) stages.
Oscillators: Including LC, crystal, relaxation and feedback oscillators, phase-locked loops, video demodulation.
Device fabrication and device physics:...
