decibels

From Circuit Diagrams to Causal Diagrams

Before management information systems got me excited, I worked in the field of semiconductors design and development, primarily focusing on the design of integrated microelectronic chip applications. Much of my solo-authored work published in the late 1980s and early 90s is about analog (OPAMPS and audio processing circuits, integration circuit path optimization, and noise cancellation in electromagnetic waves) and digital (ASIC chips, embedded microprocessors and microcontrollers, waveform generation, industrial grade test automation) and similar delightful things.

I published over one hundred technical articles and papers and several books on microelectronics design from the late 1980s to mid 1990s. My first book was published in 1989 and it was on microelectronic circuit design. In those days, digital anything was for wimps--true-blooded engineers were not afraid of analog systems, crossover noise,distortion, and all of the unpredictability that came with them. Engineering good analog circuitry was like a true art—easy to talk about but hard to actually do. I purchased my first mouse to use with a printed circuit path optimizer in the glorious days of PC-DOS and Fortran 77 (and long before semiconductor design was dumbed down by the likes of PSpice and OrCad). Some of this work was translated into several foreign languages in the 1980s and early 1990s. Some of my books from that era are still in print but hard to find.

It was getting my hands on a ZX-81 computer in the early 1980s that got me so intrigued by the beauty of elegantly designed circuits (the machine had 2 KiloBytes of memory and used magnetic cassette tapes for data storage; conventional disk drives were not yet around for sale to mere mortals). This were around the time of the ZX-80, BBC Micro, VIC 20s, Commodore 64, and Radioshack's TRS-80 computers. Ham radio was a popular pastime in those days. Who would have thought that the advent of WiFi and WiMax would bring those RF circuit design skills back into vogue? Here are some random samples of some of that work, including some foreign language translations. All of this work was solo authored.

Pulse-width modulation using sawtooth waveforms (1991)

Ultrasonic pulsed-waveform generator (1989)

Forward feedback-based pulse modulation voltage regulation mechanism

Infrared short-range data communication system (1994)

Automotive speed governor (1992)

Universal semiconductor integrity test mechanism

Differential thermal control system

Editorial against Microsoft Windows in the last days of DOS (1993). That stance remains unchanged even today because I prefer a Mac.