Peer Review, and a New Lens on Analog
It was a long but good week. Scheduled my first meeting for a preliminary review of something I’m working on, so there were a couple of late late nights because I wanted to do a good job for it. It went well, though I got some flak for scheduling it during a beer bash. Sorry guys!
Learned another lesson in the importance of peer review. With Joseph tending to more important things on paternity leave, Brian has re-emphasized frequent peer-review among our team. Me and a colleague were working all this week on something, and we thought we had it wrapped up. But before sealing it up, we did a peer review and the perspectives of the other team members revealed a more optimal solution. It wasn’t so much that our theory was flawed, but that previous experiences had shifted the risk assessments of our peers to different levels. Peer review early and often!
The other thing that I’m appreciating now is a new lens on analog circuits that I’m learning more about, especially from the analog team. In school, you first start off learning simple things like circuit networks with resistors, capacitors, inductors (RLC circuits) which leads to some linear systems stuff. Then you throw in operational amplifiers, and typically analyze them in their steady state. Even in more focused analog circuits courses with multiple transistors, you have two “lens” onto a circuit: large signal and small signal. In the large signal view, you focus on making sure the circuit is “biased” in the right mode of operation. After this condition is set, you then dive into the small signal view and assume the amplification properties are practically linear.
However, while this can be useful for integrated circuit design, but it doesn’t tell the whole story; especially at the level that we use components. I’m learning a new way of looking at these components, in which you observe the state of all the components at incremental time steps with respect to specific inputs. It’s this kind of approach that best helps me understand why a particular component is placed at a particular point….something that isn’t always intuitively obvious on a first look.
It’s just one of the many ways that “real-world engineering” can differ quite a bit from what we learn in the classroom.