Poles by Inspection, Zeros by Rejection

Hi everyone! Today I wanted to talk about poles and zeros, what they are mathematically, but more importantly provide intuition for what they actually represent in a circuit, and why it's so much easier to find and approximate poles while most textbooks either ignore zeros or "predict" them. An excellent text that helped me connect … Continue reading Poles by Inspection, Zeros by Rejection →

Microelectronics Flash Cards

Before I started grad school, I made flash cards to refresh my microelectronics knowledge. I forgot them at my last job, but luckily someone found and beautifully transcribed them. It's like leaving behind a caterpillar and finding a butterfly. Huge thanks to Brian Casillas-Rodriguez at Bruker for taking the initiative! And as always, if you … Continue reading Microelectronics Flash Cards →

WTF is parasitic capacitance?

I've always enjoyed the term "hand-wavey". It's such a stark contrast to what people imagine engineers do. You learn all this advanced calculus and linear algebra in college, and get a giant transfer function for your circuit and do the Laplace transform and draw a graph and there's all this talk of poles and phase … Continue reading WTF is parasitic capacitance? →

2-Port Network Cheat Sheet

I sort of went down a rabbit hole getting a little obsessed with 2-port networks, an analysis technique that can be very useful for things like power systems, RF circuits, and feedback block diagrams. I might do a post explaining 2-port analysis, but for now I just wanted to show a quick summary cheat sheet … Continue reading 2-Port Network Cheat Sheet →