3 ms·
This isn't particularly cursed. I mean we've had avalanche pulse generators for well over half a century easily. It's just exploiting semiconductor characterist
by cryo32 3mo ago
This isn't particularly cursed. I mean we've had avalanche pulse generators for well over half a century easily. It's just exploiting semiconductor characteristics they don't teach you in the usual garbage undergrad textbooks.
- denotational 3mo ago> the usual garbage undergrad textbooks Out of interest, please could you give some examples of textbooks you consider garbage, and some you consider not to be (undergrad or otherwise)?
- cryo32 3mo agoGarbage -> Sedra and Smith particularly - hate it, anything which kicks you in the nuts right up front with Laplace and networks abstractions, anything from Pearson - have never seen a good one. Good -> Razavi (Fundamentals of Microelectronics), Art of Electronics, most Jim Williams stuff (AN's and articles), Bowick RF Circuit design. They're actually useful.
- SAI_Peregrinus 3mo agoI find Sedra/Smith a terrible introduction, but a good reference. It's nice once you've already built an intuition for how things work to be able to go back & build up the mathematical models, but trying to understand the behavior of circuits from the math first is a bad order.
- fvwqcecvq 3mo agoI don't know, I found Sedra/Smith to be an excellent introduction. But personally I think the whole Sedra/Smith vs Razavi argument is basically vi vs emacs for EEs.
- variadix 3mo agoAgreed on Sedra and Smith vs Razavi. Razavi uploaded lectures to YouTube that helped me a ton at the time.
- xqb64 3mo agoWhat do you think about the author's upcoming book ("The Secret Life of Circuits")[0], for someone who is just starting out with electronics? [0]: https://nostarch.com/secret-life-of-circuits https://nostarch.com/secret-life-of-circuits
- cryo32 3mo agoJust had a quick scan through it. ToC is a bit rambling. Content sample isn't enough to judge the whole book. I'll reserve judgement. It looks considerably better than Practical Electronics for Inventors and several orders of magnitude better than Mimms' and Make garbage. Probably a good start. We shall see. I was going to write my own book on the matter but quite frankly I don't have the time or energy for it.
- bsder 3mo ago> Art of Electronics I would never recommend AoE to pretty much anybody nowadays. The problem is that AoE happily presents circuits you should almost never use right next to circuits you should almost always use with no indications distinguishing the two.
- marshray 3mo agoWell, if it's not an advertised spec on the datasheet, and constrained in the direction you're using it, then all guarantees are off and it's on you to qualify the parts on a batch-by-batch basis. I think that counts as "cursed" from a design-for-manufacturing perspective. "After a production run of 12,000 units the TR-808 was no more." https://secretlifeofsynthesizers.com/the-strange-heart-of-the-roland-tr-808/ https://secretlifeofsynthesizers.com/the-strange-heart-of-th...
- kazinator 3mo agoBehringer sells a clone of the TR-808 called RD-8. They must have solved that problem somehow. They went as far as cloning some vintage Roland silicon that cannot be sourced, so the transistor issue seems minor by comparison.