Strategies, methods and techniques for designing electronic circuits.
The design of analog electronic circuits is considered by many people to be complex. This is mainly because designers have to deal with many relevant performance aspects that can be achieved in many different ways. In other words, there are many degrees of freedom for obtaining the desired performance of an electronic circuit. Theoretical concepts, circuit topologies, electronic devices, their operating conditions and the physical lay-out of a system, together constitute an enormous design space in which it is easy to get lost. For this reason, analog electronics is often regarded as an art rather than a solid discipline.
At first glance, there doesn’t seem to be a straightforward way to design analog circuits and systems: experienced designers, intuitively, use all these degrees of freedom to modify and combine known solutions into new ones. However, intuition is knowledge the origin of which has become unclear. It cannot easily be shared with novices, and therefore, it cannot be a basis for the education of designers. The design of electronic circuits, however, can be shared and understood if it is presented in a structured way. This requires a clear formulation of design goals, techniques and strategies and a clear distinction between theoretical concepts and their physical implementations.
Instead of taking numerous existing solutions to known problems as a starting point, it is far more effective to start a new design with clear understanding of theoretical concepts, methods and techniques, and study how they can be implemented in such a way that the possibilities of the implementation technology are maximally exploited.
A structured method that offers proper sequencing and orthogonalization of well-defined design steps not only helps the designer to obtain the desired performance-to-costs ratio in an efficient and effective way, but also forms a solid basis for analog design education and analog design automation.
Structured design of analog electronics have been developed and educated from the 1980’s at the Delft University of Technology.
