Unstable, but fun!
Giuseppe Stromboli. Ravioli. Buco di Beppo. Joe Pesci III. He went by many names, but most of the time I just called him small guy . He was a gangster, a fierce warrior, a dummy, and a total sweetie pie. He grew up in northern New Jersey, a scrapper, a bruiser. He never really knew his Continue reading Eulogy For A Cat
Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs) are the backbone of electronics, the land we build on. To the average person, when you re thinking of circuits, you re thinking of PCBs. There s a lot to say about circuit design, layout, signal integrity, safety, manufacturability etc. but I wanna get even more basic than that and describe what a PCB Continue reading ABCs of PCBs
One of the, if not the biggest hurdles to understanding transistor circuits and system modeling is small-signal analysis. As with all things, the reason it s difficult to understand is that professors are given very little time to provide context, so it s given or received like scripture on golden tablets in a language you ve Continue reading Misconceptions: small-signal analysis
I saw a great question posted the other day, why are high impedance nodes slow? Makes sense why that can be confusing, a transistor looks like a current source, multiply that current by a high impedance that must mean very high gain, why would that not be true at higher frequencies? Why does the resistance Continue reading Why are high impedances nodes slow?
The transistor will go down as one of the most consequential inventions in history, behind agriculture, paper, and the Super Soaker. But on the list of inventions that have completely transformed the very fabric of the human condition, it showed up pretty late in the game, and that s because it s a fairly complex thing. Conceptually Continue reading 5 Stages of understanding transistors
Because I spend all day at work browsing DigiKey and reading articles about electronics, I get served up ads for textbooks, causing me to rapidly and aggressively re-evaluate my life. One of the books it advertised was titled Wandering Spurs in MASH-Based Fractional-N Frequency Synthesizers by Dawei Mai Michael Peter Kennedy. This is the Continue reading Find Your Niche
Transimpedance amplifiers (TIAs) find wide use in electronics and systems, from things like optical communication transceivers in WiFi routers, to electron multipliers in mass spectrometers. They re one of my favorite basic subcircuits to design. They re often used in situations where you re trying to squeeze water out of a rock (our TIA at Bruker for mass Continue reading Transimpedance Bandwidth
This post is for anyone taking linear algebra or wants to understand why they hated taking it. I m taking a graduate level linear systems analysis course that s meant to serve as a primer to things like non-linear systems and advanced control theory, and I ve been having flashbacks to what I think is one of the Continue reading The Basis of Linear Algebra: Purposely Confusing Undergrads
Hi everyone! Today I wanted to talk about poles and zeros, what they are mathematically, but more importantly provide intuition for what they actually represent in a circuit, and why it s so much easier to find and approximate poles while most textbooks either ignore zeros or predict them. An excellent text that helped me connect Continue reading Poles by Inspection, Zeros by Rejection
Before I started grad school, I made flash cards to refresh my microelectronics knowledge. I forgot them at my last job, but luckily someone found and beautifully transcribed them. It s like leaving behind a caterpillar and finding a butterfly. Huge thanks to Brian Casillas-Rodriguez at Bruker for taking the initiative! And as always, if you Continue reading Microelectronics Flash Cards