> For example, no one teaches you the way you see in this particular segment of an old EEVBlog episode [1].
That's odd. EE students in any ABET-accredited program should be formally trained to identify discrete analog design patterns like this without the aid of functional outlines. I know I was (even if I don't design analog circuits for a living). It's also standard practice in industry to segement a given system into simpler functional blocks as a first step in any analysis, discrete analog or VLSI alike.
Like an experienced developer who can often infer design intent by looking at a few lines of well written code, so too can a professional analog designer with circuits that look like magic to the untrained eye.
Maybe I’m not experienced enough, but my ability to do that successfully and rapidly varies dramatically based on a very subjective “how good the schematic was drawn”. Some schematics I look at an easily identify “that’s an input diff pair with current mirrors”, “that’s the gain stage”, “that’s an AB biased output stage”, etc etc. And some are... inscrutable.
My “one trick” though is that I have a drawer full of different coloured highlighters. When I encounter a “badly drawn” schematic, I pull out the highlighters and start colouring the nodes in the circuit and working through what functions each part may serve. One common thing I’ve seen, which I consider very sloppy, is that a circuit can still be made up of common topologies, but the designer didn’t put a lot of effort into making them look like their textbook versions; they realize “I need 4 resistors, a transistor, and a diode”, plop those down, and then draw wandering connections between them. It’s still correct and functional, but not very ergonomic for the user. Sometimes the parts are a long way from each other with big long nets drawn between them (or worse! Labelled nets that don’t actually draw a full line)
And writing all of this, I’ve realized that it’s exactly the same as code. High cohesion and loose coupling and all that :)
>One common thing I’ve seen, which I consider very sloppy, is that a circuit can still be made up of common topologies, but the designer didn’t put a lot of effort into making them look like their textbook versions; they realize “I need 4 resistors, a transistor, and a diode”, plop those down, and then draw wandering connections between them. It’s still correct and functional, but not very ergonomic for the user
Very true. This is exactly like spaghetti code and very hard to make sense of for somebody lacking experience.
That's odd. EE students in any ABET-accredited program should be formally trained to identify discrete analog design patterns like this without the aid of functional outlines. I know I was (even if I don't design analog circuits for a living). It's also standard practice in industry to segement a given system into simpler functional blocks as a first step in any analysis, discrete analog or VLSI alike.
Like an experienced developer who can often infer design intent by looking at a few lines of well written code, so too can a professional analog designer with circuits that look like magic to the untrained eye.