A few months back, Tim Iskander, one of our engineers, sent out an all-hands e-mail with a link to TI’s Analog Engineer’s Pocket Reference. The subject line was: “interesting info it you’re a geek/engineer.” The body of the e-mail was pretty much the link and a note that read “If you’re not [a geek], then sorry for the spam. (But, hey…I think you’re out-numbered here!).
Tim was right about the non-engineers being outnumbered at Critical Link. And he was right about this guide being of use to engineers.
In the preface, Art Kay and Tim Green, the editors, write:
“This pocket reference is intended as a valuable quick guide for often used board- and system-level design formulae. This collection of formulae is based on a combined 50 years of analog board- and system-level expertise. Much of the material herein was referred to over the years via a folder stuffed full of printouts. Those worn pages have been organized and the informa-tion is now available via this guide in a bound and hard-to-lose format!”
I think that Pocket Reference is something of a misnomer. The Reference is nearly 100 pages long. But if you put it on thumb-drive, you could stick it in our pocket. And it would be useful to have at your fingertips, as it covers a lot of the basics. The areas covered include:
- Key constants and conversions
- Discrete components
- AC and DC analog equations
- Op amp basic configurations
- OP amp bandwidth and stability
- Overview of sensors
- PCB trace R, L, C
- Wire L, R, C
- Binary, hex and decimal formats
- A/D and D/A conversions
Not that any of us Critical Linkers would have to look any of this stuff up. Still, it’s handy to have it all in one place. Just in case.
So thanks to Art and Tim at TI for pulling this together, to TI for making it available to geeks/engineers, and to our own Tim Iskander for passing the info on.