I can second this from personal experiences.  I'm quite sure that my  
first microcontroller project toward the end of undergrad (again, at  
a top-notch rated EE school) didn't work solely (or at least  
primarily) because I was switching a fair amount of current with a  
bunch of latches and didn't have bypass caps on anything.  And no one  
pointed it out either.  It wasn't until my senior design project  
where I joined a team with a super bright student who knew all about  
the realities of EE who taught me most of the real-world useful stuff  
that I learned in school that I understood supply bypassing, layout  
issues, and the like.

Now I'm in a grad program with artists and engineers working together  
and I'm sure everyone is sick of hearing me preach about bypass caps.

-n.



On Jan 30, 2007, at 4:31 AM, Alan B. Pearce wrote:

>> Teaching students about parasitic effects, and the fact that
>> those PCB traces aren't superconductors with no inductance,
>> is very important, if they are to have any hope of getting
>> things working right in the real world.
>
> I still remember the university student we had here on a gap year,  
> who had
> no clues about using supply bypass capacitors - never come up in  
> class ...
>
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