On Jan 28, 2007, at 5:00 AM, Vasile Surducan wrote:

> You have an advantage being programmer (the advantage is your logic,
> assuming all programmers have good logic) but usually software
> programmers have serious leackage in basic of electronics and they
> start without having the smallest ideea about how really a transistor
> works.
>
heh.  You may be trying to understand too much.  The details of how
a transistor operates are no more important to understanding the
average electronics circuit than the the details of horizontal vs
vertical microcode or red/black trees vs radius trees in the average
piece of software.

When I got my EE degree, we spent a long time learning calculus, and
physics, and then applying that to components and semiconductors, only
to spend our final year working with simplifications like phasors,
ideal op-amps, and digital gates.  I don't think "real" EEs deal
very much with individual components; it's more like "this segment
is a low-pass filter, and this is a comment emitter amplifier, and
this over here is an analog integrator, but this transistor is just
a switch..."  There are more complicated circuits, of course, just
as there are programs that are on the edge of research in computer
science, but I don't think they come up as often as you might think.

BillW
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