Archive for October, 2006

Oct 29 2006

Layout driven schematic

Published by The Fake Engineer at 12:10 am under Class

The sole purpose of a circuit schematic is to help the analog circuit designer design a circuit by creating a level of abstraction between circuit level mechanics and the circuit’s physical implementation. However, designing a circuit without consideration for layout will lead to a layout with an inefficient use of space, or a layout with [...]

One response so far

Oct 26 2006

Killing two (or three and perhaps four) birds with one stone

Published by The Fake Engineer at 2:59 am under Class, Research

It turns out that I can take the amplifier I made in the first project, add a compensation cap somewhere, make minor changes to the amplifier to get enough gain and swing, and I’ll be pretty much done with the second project.
Amazing, isn’t it? It looks like internal shunt feedback will save my project butt [...]

No responses yet

Oct 25 2006

Wah. Group meeting tomorrow. Why?

Published by The Fake Engineer at 9:35 pm under Research

I only have half-ideas that don’t go anywhere.
UPDATE: It’s 3:30am on 10/26, I am looking at my presentation slides, and I am surprised I managed to write some decent BS. I feel good about this. My half-ideas still don’t go anywhere, but that’s okay. At least I’ve been able to eliminate those half-ideas from future [...]

2 responses so far

Oct 24 2006

Just wow

Published by The Fake Engineer at 11:11 pm under Class, Research, Stupid Stuff

http://designers-guide.org/
No analog designer is complete without this site. I’m so impressed that I added this site to the links on the right.

No responses yet

Oct 18 2006

Yahoo! and MSN just joined Google’s lameness

Published by The Fake Engineer at 9:09 pm under Blog Junk

http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=vdsat&fr=yfp-t-501&toggle=1&cop=mss&ei=UTF-8
http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=vdsat&FORM=MSNH
Meanwhile, Google summarizes my page quite nicely:

No responses yet

Oct 18 2006

Classic foolishness

Published by The Fake Engineer at 8:47 pm under Class, Stupid Stuff

During a 5 minute break today in class, I was discussing a project with someone. Not realizing that the whole class fell silent and the professor was about to continue with his lecture, I blurted out in my classic dumbheadedness…
WHY MAKE IT MORE COMPLICATED THAN IT NEEDS TO BE!?
I turned towards the front of the [...]

No responses yet

Oct 14 2006

I am having waaay too much fun

Published by The Fake Engineer at 7:13 am under Class

It is 7:08am, I didn’t sleep at all.
I scrapped my circuit and completely redesigned it. The number of transistors is now 15, down from 33. Area was reduced by approximately a factor of 10. This amplifier completely blows everything else out of the water.
New amp specs:
Bandwidth: 41.25MHz
Gain: 57.91dB
Power: 637.1uW (will end up around 650uW when [...]

No responses yet

Oct 12 2006

Classic picture

Published by The Fake Engineer at 2:40 am under Stupid Stuff

For your viewing pleasure. If you don’t get it, don’t worry about it. It is a shame that I didn’t get a picture of spice monkey with Itail.
UPDATE: It just occurred to me that his has been my wallpaper for the last 3 months.

3 responses so far

Oct 11 2006

Competition

Published by The Fake Engineer at 10:03 pm under Class

The good
My amplifier used to burn 1.6mW and everyone else’s amplifier burned more than 2mW. I told two of my good friends how much power I was burning and they immediately started designing their amplifiers to burn less power than mine. However, what they were trying was sick: they were shooting for 0.5mW. They came [...]

No responses yet

Oct 08 2006

There goes my sweater

Published by The Fake Engineer at 12:14 am under Stupid Stuff

Today is a sad, sad day. A hole was already forming. The washing machine finally did it in today. Looks like my oversized Berkeley sweater is next up in line.

2 responses so far

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