Rolf wrote...

>So, one observation as relative newbie: I wish there was a "concept 
>index". [...] What I needed was to be able to say: 
>Here is a problem, what are good ways to solve it, and how does one 
>discover what parts fulfil a given function.

The closest I think you'll come to such a "concept index" are the
application notes written by the major semiconductor vendors.
They're goldmines full of information.

National Semiconductor, Linear Technology, Texas Instruments,
Fairchild Semiconductor, Analog Devices, and Maxim (as well as
others) all have large collections of appnotes that you can
download from their websites in .pdf format.

These cover a huge variety of topics and application problems in
electronics, most of them from exactly the angle you're trying to
take: here's a problem, how can it be solved and which components
have qualities that make them particularly suited to solving that
problem.

>How does one efficiently find the right part to solve a particular 
>problem? 

By narrowing the search domain.  Nearly all of my designs use
parts from a very short list of "favorite devices," ones which I
use repeatedly and with which I've become very familiar so I have
a good feel for what they can and can't do.  

The list changes gradually over time, driven by technology and
economics and the meanderings of my current "problem mix", but
I'd guess that at any given point in time I do 99% of my
designing with fewer than four dozen different semiconductor
components (counting transistors, MOSFETs, diodes, opamps,
instrumentation amps, comparators, voltage references and voltage
regulators).

So when the "right" component is defined as "something suitable
from my current 'stable' of parts", it becomes fairly easy to
find.

Hope this helps a bit...

Dave D.

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