Electronic Circuit Design

One of the most interesting things about electronic circuit design is that the better you get at it, the harder it gets. When I first started designing electronic circuits, there were only a few simple things that I had to worry about. I was doing it as a hobby, so I was intentionally keeping everything simple. All I had to do was make sure that all of my values were correctly calculated and that I wasn't crossing any wires. For years, I thought that this was all there was to electronic circuit design until I decided to go into it as a career. When I did, I discovered a whole new level of complexity to electronic ingenuity.

You see, designing electronic circuits is more than just a matter of balancing the values of components. It has as much to do with layout as it does with schematics. A perfect electronic circuit board has to have everything in just the right place or else interference will degrade the quality of the circuit. This is particularly true with today's extremely high speed digital circuits. Even the inductance from the wire traces has to be taken into account when you are doing electronic circuit design. A printed circuit board that may in theory seemed to solve a design problem could actually not perform under the strains of high powered, high speed computation. No matter how intelligent your electronic circuit designers, you will never know for sure until you test it.

Fortunately, electronic circuit design modeling software has gotten very good in the past several years. Nowadays, electronic circuits designers have some incredibly sophisticated tools at their disposal. Electronic CAD programs in particular have gotten so good that they can estimate all sorts of unexpected factors. Nonetheless, in electronic circuit design the challenge is to remain ahead of the curve. There are always new materials being invented, new techniques being designed, and new limits being pushed. As circuit boards get smaller and faster, the techniques for fabrication and layout become almost as important as the theoretical design of the circuit.

Still, it is important to keep the fun in electronic circuit design. Whenever I get frustrated with designing electronic circuits, I try to get back to the feeling I had when I was a fresh new electronics engineer. I like to think about the joy that I used to take from figuring out the solution to an electronic engineering problem. If I focus on that, I can get back to that same feeling of delight even today. It is just a matter of not letting it stress me out and keeping a sense of perspective. If you can keep your perspective, you can keep your sanity.