mwbajor

They're just ratios....

Im a HW engineer and don't really understand "complexity" as far as this article describes it. I didn't read it in depth but it doesn't really give any good examples with specifics. Can someone give a detailed example of what the author is really talking about?

We use this website for diving off the US East coast.

https://www.facebook.com/p/Eastern-Search-Survey-10006355294...

ESS has mapped and imaged many ships off the eastern seaboard, some sunk by U-boats during WW1 and WW2. The images and data collected are excellent.

The observation of the Hubble constant requires us to measure distance to an object in space. This is very hard to do at the extreme distances required (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallax). In the end, the variation in the Hubble constant might be only due to our limited accuracy in measurement.

All definitions of entropy stem from one central, universal definition: Entropy is the amount of energy unable to be used for useful work. Or better put grammatically: entropy describes the effect that not all energy consumed can be used for work.

Because they would assume he has American and British friends that he still might talk to.

"....why doesn't that throw in every EDA tool?"

This would require repetitive SPICE simulations, or basic rule checking at the very least. Nobody does full SPICE simulations at the board level however basic input/output port checking (usually in the ERC check) does get performed. Even with RF designs, you carve out the piece you need to examine or design and simulate that. For the chips I've worked on, the full chip would get a SPICE simulation that would take days/weeks but this was for more R+D oriented mixed signal designs. I guess what I'm saying is the simulation of a circuit is best performed as a deliberate, iterative step in the circuit design process.

When it comes to layout however, you do get hints from the DRC checking tool (Design Rule Constraints) that will tell you if your trace is drawn incorrectly based on the DRC constraints and nowadays sometimes from an EM simulation that can be run in the background.

Completely automated design especially for analog will most likely never be a thing for the other reasons you list. However, I already can use "known good" circuits and modularize them for reuse which does speed things up. This is critical in the ASIC world due to the large hierarchies in the design. Modular reuse is also a growing tool in the PCB world. Cadence now has a very nice module/reuse tool that can even detect and create modules to prevent you from having to redraw the layout for a sub-circuit multiple times if its not instantiated as a module already. I always like when more people want to get involved in HW, but what the OP is showing largely exists in the form of TCL and SKILL scripts in current EDA SW packages.

I work in analog,

1) Noise is an issue as the system gets complex. You can't get away with counting to 1 anymore, all those levels in between matter. 2) Its hard to make an analog computer reconfigurable. 3) Analog computers exist commercially believe it or not, but for niche applications and essentially as coprocessors.

You're never going to find a solid answer to these questions. The best you can do is ask yourself "does this seem reasonable".

Bandpass sampling is a regular technique used in the RF world to mix down a signal to its final IF or baseband frequency, digitally. In this case, you are undersampling but using a well defined signal that you have apriori knowledge of where it is before and after sampling.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undersampling#:~:text=In%20sig....

"Those resources don't come out of nowhere, so there is a need for immigration as well to get work done."

Efficiency gains in a process certainly create extra "resources" whatever they might be. But I do applaud you for not saying "we need immigration because we need ethnic food" like most people say nowadays.

Almost every person that has told me about the perils of overpopulation...more people, has also told me that its in my best interest have open borders e.g. more people. Why the hypocrisy in message? The unbelievable immigration in my country is causing a reduction in quality of living not unlike what I would expect with overpopulation because.... it is overpopulation.

Why does everyone support wall streets "increase GDP at all costs" immigration platform? It seems to be astroturfed alot.

Pay a country's people more so that they have more time/resources to dedicate to making a family. Even better, incentivize families. Or is that too expensive for bankers?

I clicked on the link thinking it was about parasitic extraction and capacitance tables; referred to as "cap tables" in industry for circuit design. I was very disappointed.

I did not read the article in-depth but class D audio amplifiers use variable pulse widths and then filter it before the speaker. Aside from very good efficiency you also remove the need for a transformer using this method hence why its used.

Its like the chris-chan phenomenon: Who is worse, the person the blog is focused on or the people obsessed with them?

Your fellow canadian VE7KFM is one of the worst offenders:

https://ve7kfm.com/profiles.html

I've been yelled at by him before on 14.275, about 15 years ago. He's still at it.

Yes, but has a major purchaser of spectrum complained? No, because its CB and they're not interfering with AM/FM broadcast, first responders, aviation or cellular bands. Therefore, nothing will get done and I doubt the FCC is even monitoring it.

Halloween Harry. Descent. Harpoon (I think there was a shareware version). Escape velocity.

I used to get motion sickness as a kid when playing descent. Great game though.

Everyone is saying "survivorship bias" but I don't think its that easy. How is survivorship biased by reparability? Is the widget still considered more durable if it breaks but can be fixed? I would say so.

" full stack rf role"

This is the right idea, in many cases, the "HW" team might focus on RF but does "antennas to bits" (i hate that term) because of the need to get a prototype up and running to test it. If you have baseband circuit and DSP experience you could be poised for a lateral move especially since the operational frequency will be less critical for your skills. For example, without years of mmWave experience a move into doing mmWave RF wouldn't make sense but that doesn't mean you can't work on other parts of the mmWave system.

RF HW design is very much a systems engineering field and folks that have experience in each block are more desirable than ones that focus on only one piece in most cases.

You really are proving my point. Based on your misuse of nomenclature its obvious you're not a HW guy. The ADC is the last in an RF chain and typically sets the systems dynamic range if you've done things right. There is nothing special about the ADC in the RFSOC other than the designer will not need to worry about creating a physical, digital interface to the programmable logic.

I don't even know where to start on your "temporal dynamic range" comment....

As I said, nature is analog, it will never go away. Interesting areas of analog research are in things such as switched capacitor architectures where you can filter as close to the antenna as possible, reducing the impact of an interferer on the rest of your signal chain. Also similar is continuous time signal processing where you can perform your signal processing on an analog signal without discretizing it in time, effectively giving you the ability to make sense out of your analog data as close to the sensor (or antenna) as possible.

The problem is you can't tweak these things with a software update. Their relative inflexibility makes them unpopular outside of a defense or research setting but analog solutions are typically higher in performance than digital solutions but that can depend on definition as well.

Yes. Many analog design groups in college went from 10's of students 10-15 years ago to just a few now, not due to lack of funding but due to a lack of interest. Our interface to nature is through analog signals but due to the heavy reliance on HW intuition and its relative inflexibility (but more 'elegant solutions' if you ask me) analog electronics continues to grow in unpopularity in industry and academia follows. Yes, there are just some older guys updating old designs in many instances. The push for RFSOCs and similar products is partially to reduce reliance on the greybeards. Its a shame because there are very interesting areas of analog electronics such as continuous time signal processing.

TLDR: To answer your question, to reduce the reliance on a relative few engineers, the market solved it with a few products that are 'just good enough'. This has become a self perpetuating cycle, race to the bottom. There will still be many analog/RF EEs but relegated to a few niche sub-industries serving mainly the DoD and RFIC industries. Even the telecom industry is planning to pipe back raw, downconverted baseband data to a central location to do SDR DSP rather than rely on a modem at the basestation. All for flexibility in lieu of power/efficiency, NRE etc.

Yes all correct, you didn't capture any of the tradeoffs but thats the basic idea.

Yes. But if you really want to get into it you need to do it. You could make some cheap PCBs and measure them with a cheap network analyzer. RF design has never been more accessible. The books will get you started and you will start to think about things like de-embedding circuit elements which is very important and not covered in books. You will also start to see why people consider RF design challenging; e.g. curves in the books will depict a "trend" in the circuit and in real-life, everything is a capacitor and/or inductor which causes the real life measurements to deviate substantially from the ideal for reasons that are not always obvious.

An even more cheaper accessible intro to RF is just plain old analog electronics. Building amplifiers ,etc.

Not only that, but it also stems from "management" or "customers" unable to contemplate tradeoffs in the design. The reason FPGAs and RFSOCs are pushed so much in certain industries (we all know which one) is because the customer wants everything reconfigurable because they can't make decisions now, or in most cases, not competent enough to make decisions now. However, they are OK with buying a $25K+ FPGA or RFSOC which is why the market is there and also why few understand the actual art of RF design and radio architecture anymore. RF budgeting is almost non-existant. Most Jr. engineers have never seen a level diagram and the only places you will find them is in old watkins johnson app notes. SDR design is ultimately a race to the bottom in most cases in terms of good design but not necessarily cheap design.

"I don't get why only men are making this decision though."

Oh come on, we all know why. Its socially acceptable to hate men and blame them for everything bad. It starts or feeds negative emotions.

What got me into analog computing was eliminating the step (data conversion) between sensing the signal and doing something with it. But when you add in the inflexibility of analog circuits, the mostly analog solution is almost always the bad one.