Page 45 - The Art and Science of Analog Circuit Design

We Used to Get Byrned a Lot, and We Liked it

Professional breadboards were similar to the hobbyboards until perhaps
the early '80s. At work you built circuits on higher-quality breadboards.
But within only a few years, critical ICs were available in surface-mount
packages, or more expensive and clumsy socketed alternatives. The. pin
count of the packages just skyrocketed. The sockets are expensive and
fragile. A transition began which is almost complete today: breadboards
are simply not attempted to develop each subsystem of a board; the first
tentative schematic will be laid out on a full-fledged circuit board. Any
corrections are simply implemented as board revisions. These boards
contain mostly surface-mount components. This technique is not practi-
cal for the hobbyist.
God, what a nightmare it is to troubleshoot these boards. They are
generally multilayer and the individual traces can't be seen, so finding
interconnects is impossible. The only connections that can be probed or
modified are the IC's leads themselves. You generally can't read the
markings on resistors or capacitors, because they are so small. Develop-
ment work is accomplished with stereo microscopes.
So hobby electronics has taken a major beating in the last twenty
years. It's become intellectually difficult to build a really significant proj-
ect, to say nothing of increased expense and construction difficulty. This
portends a generation of relatively green engineers who have only college
experience with electronics. God help us. I suppose there still are some
handy people, as demonstrated by the continuing component sales of
Radio Shack. Too bad that they have diminished the component content
of their stores over the years, and traditional hobby suppliers like Lafay-
ette and Heathkit have altogether disappeared. There is no substitute for
pre-college electronics experience.
Gone too is the magic people used to see in electronics. As a kid, I saw
that other kids and their parents were amazed that radios and TVs worked
at all. Our folks used to think of installing a TV antenna as an electronics
project. Parents gave their kids science toys. These were great; we had
chemistry sets, metal construction kits, build-your-own-radio-from-
household-junk sets, model rockets, crystal-growing kits, all sorts of
great science projects. The television stations even kept Mr. Wizard alive,
the weekly science experiment program.
It seems now that people assume they can't understand science or
technology, and accept this ignorance. Kind of like religious belief. Peo-
ple seem to enjoy technology less, and expect more. We even predict
future advancements when we have no idea how to accomplish them. We
don't give our young children these science toys, even though the kids
would find them wondrous. Parents are imposing jaded attitudes on kids.
This would be all right, except that electronics has grown in scope
beyond the ability of college to teach it well. Students graduating today
have insufficient breadth of knowledge of the field, and not enough depth
to really take on a professional project. I don't blame them; it's probably

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