Page 69 - The Art and Science of Analog Circuit Design

Thoughts on Becoming and Being an Analog Circuit Designer

a would-be analog circuit designer for the impact this career choice has
on one's home life. 16
If your S.O. is an analog designer, your relationship will be much hap-
pier once you come to understand and accept some of the basic differ-
ences between analog circuit designers and normal people.

1. Analog circuit designers consider beer one of the major food
groups and an essential hacking tool. (See "Things You Need to
Survive as a 'Real' Analog Designer.") To avoid major alterca-
tions, be sure there's always beer in the house.
Fortunately, my husband's students signed him up for a Beer-of-the
Month club. Each month the UPS lady drops a big box of beer on our
doorstep, putting him in hacker heaven and saving me many trips to the
beer store.
2. Circuit designers don't tell time in the same way that the rest of
us do. Unfortunately, I still haven't figured out the exact formula
for converting circuit design time into regular time.

For example, let's say my husband is in the middle of a hacking proj-
ect at work and he calls to tell me that he's going to head home in about
half an hour. If he's alone and I know he's working on a project that
doesn't require an oscilloscope, I simply multiply the time by two. If
there is an oscilloscope involved, I multiply by three. If he's got any cir-
cuit design friends with him, I generally add at least 40 minutes per
friend if they're not drinking beer and an extra 2 hours per friend if they
are. I believe the beer effect is nonlinear. My current empirical formula
for computing circuit design time in minutes is thus:

t cd = (2 + N scopes) t + (40 + 120 k brewski) N friend
where N scopes is the number of oscilloscopes present, k brewsld is the linear
approximation for the nonlinear beer effect (taken to be one, but can be
replaced by a suitable time-dependent nonlinearity) and N friends is the
number of circuit design friends present.
My calculations are rarely perfect, so I'm pretty sure there are some
other variables involved. It may have something to do with the number of
op amps in the project, but since I'm still trying to figure out what an op
amp is, I haven't quite determined how that should factor into the formula,
My suspicion is that this formula varies slightly among hackers, but
you're probably safe to use this as a starting point for deriving your own
formula.

3. Circuit designers have an interesting concept of economics. Last
weekend we wandered down the breakfast cereal aisle of our local

16. The opinions and/or other crap written by my wife are completely her fault and do not reflect the
opinions and/or other crap of Stanford University or myself in any way.

52