Overview

Electronic circuit design can be divided into two areas: the first consists in designing a circuit that will fulfil its specified function, sometimes, under laboratory conditions; the second consists in designing the same circuit so that every production model of it will fulfil its specified function, and no other undesired and unspecified function, always, in the field, reliably over its lifetime. When related to circuit design skills, these two areas coincide remarkably well with what engineers are taught at college basic circuit theory, Ohm s Law, Th venin, Kirchhoff, Norton, Maxwell and so on and what they learn on the job that there is no such thing as the ideal component, that printed circuits are more than just a collection of tracks, and that electrons have an unfortunate habit of never doing exactly what they re told.

This book has been written with the intention of bringing together and tying up some of the loose ends of analogue and digital circuit design, those parts that are never mentioned in the textbooks and rarely admitted elsewhere. In other words, it relates to the second of the above areas.

Its genesis came with the growing frustration experienced as a senior design engineer, attempting to recruit people for junior engineer positions in companies whose foundations rested on analogue design excellence. Increasingly, it became clear that the people I and my colleagues were interviewing had only the sketchiest of training in electronic circuit design, despite offering apparently...