Book Review

Troubleshooting Analog Circuits
author - Robert A. Pease
Butterworth-Heinemann - ©1991

Reader Level

Amazon Rating

Synopsis Even the most hardened digital oriented mechatronic designer is gonna have to face an analog interface design or debug session at sometime in his or her career. When that happens, you will want to have this reference handy. Like Bob Pease, this book has been around for “a while.” But, also like Bob Pease, there is no ready replacement! Although the tile says "troubleshooting", there is a lot of useful design information about simple things - like choosing the right kind of capacitor - that we all take for granted until our design flakes-out for some unknown reason. This is a very readable book. Inter dispersed though out the book are observations and humorous anecdotes from Pease's long career. The process of great design is not always a pretty sight - The cover of this books says it all!

Area of Interest
Analog Design

Audience
This book is not an academic treatise. It is clearly intended for working analog designers building real circuits.

Topics
This book covers design troubleshooting, from concept to implementation, to final checkout.

The book, as the title suggests, is targeted at primarily at analog. It does cover analog-digital interfacing to a limited extent.

There is a lot of useful application and design information in the book But, as stated above, this is not a treatise on analog design, but a discussion (humorous at times) of analog design implementation and common analog design pitfalls.

Organization
This book is organized as general discussion on analog troubleshooting - but from the perspective of first understanding the physical nature of the components which are used to implement a design and the proper selection for a particular application. New designers will probably want to read the book straight through. Experienced designers will find the book a handy reference and review.

Chapters 1 and 2 start off with a description of Pease's philosophy on troubleshooting and equipment selection. Proper instrument setup and usage (critical for analog troubleshooting!) is discussed as well as some useful inexpensive homebrew instrumentation designs.

Chapters 3 - 5 cover passive components, physical composition, and how that affects circuit performance. Also covered is assembly techniques, and pitfalls in layout designs.

Chapters 6-8 discuss diodes, transistor and op-amps. The emphasis is not on describing particular kinds of circuits, or circuit analysis in general, but on how to implement a robust design, and how to test the design to verify that it will function as specified over a wide range of conditions.

Chapters 9- 14 get into the nitty-gritty details of circuit implementation problems and solutions.

Finally several appendices of general references and selected topics mentioned in the text of the book covered in more detail (such as V_F and I_F on Various Diodes)

Where to buy
You can purchase this book online from amazon.com

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