Electronic Design

Analog design still has, unfortunately, a flavor of art. Art can be beautiful. However, art in itself is difficult to teach to students and difficult to transfer from experienced analog designers to new trainee designers in companies.
Structured Electronic Design: High-Performance Harmonic Oscillators and Bandgap References aims to systemize analog design. The use of orthogonalization of the design of the fundamental quality aspects (noise, distortion, and bandwidth) and hierarchy in the subsequent design steps, enables designers to achieve high-performance designs, in a relatively short time. As a result of the systematic design procedure, the effect of design decisions on the circuit performance is made clear. Additionally, the use of resources for reaching a specified performance is tracked.

If you design electronics for a living, you need Robust Electronic Design Reference Book. Written by a working engineer, who has put over 115 electronic products into production at Sycor, IBM, and Lexmark, Robust Electronic Design Reference covers all the various aspects of designing and developing electronic devices and systems that:

When I attended college we studied vacuum tubes in our junior year. At that time an average radio had ?ve vacuum tubes and better ones even seven. Then transistors appeared in 1960s. A good radio was judged to be one with more thententransistors. Latergoodradioshad15–20transistors and after that everyone stopped counting transistors. Today modern processors runing personal computers have over 10milliontransistorsandmoremillionswillbeaddedevery year. The difference between 20 and 20M is in complexity, methodology and business models. Designs with 20 tr- sistors are easily generated by design engineers without any tools, whilst designs with 20M transistors can not be done by humans in reasonable time without the help of Prof. Dr. Gajski demonstrates the Y-chart automation. This difference in complexity introduced a paradigm shift which required sophisticated methods and tools, and introduced design automation into design practice. By the decomposition of the design process into many tasks and abstraction levels the methodology of designing chips or systems has also evolved. Similarly, the business model has changed from vertical integration, in which one company did all the tasks from product speci?cation to manufacturing, to globally distributed, client server production in which most of the design and manufacturing tasks are outsourced.

The general understanding of design is that it should lead to a manufacturable product. Neither the design nor the process of manufacturing is perfect. As a result, the product will be faulty, will require testing and fixing. Where does economics enter this scenario?