Analog

Robert A. Pease, analog designer par excellence

They say we live in a digital age. This age was dawning when I started in electronics and I had the privilege of being involved in some of the early work on digital TV and radio at Kingswood Warren.

The world we live in may be actually digital (quantum and all that) but for most purposes our senses interface with it, and electronic circuits emulate it, in an analog way. One notable exception - if you are young with good hearing and the night is quiet, you can just about make out the hiss caused by the random motion of air molecules hitting your ear drum. The ear is truly remarkable.

Electronics is increasingly digital. Just about any custom design I carry out will involve one or more micro-controllers.  A micro-controller is essentially a complete computer on a chip.  Some come as small as 1.3mm by 2.7mm and cost as little as $0.30. But at some stage most designs have to interface with humans or the world around us, and that generally means analog. Unless it is very high speed, designing digital is relatively easy - you just bolt functions together. Designing a good analog circuit is much more demanding.

Much honour is thus due to such gurus as Bob Pease and Jim Williams both, sadly, passed away.  Here's an example of Bob's writing style: I like the way he uses an ordinary phenomenon to explain a principle in electronics design.

I guess my inertial train controller was my first good analog design.  'Good' in that it was dead simple and very effective.