This has become the sad and tragic reality of analog electronics design today. Earlier this year, I spent some time with Dobby (CTO of Linear Technology) and a few of their Field Applications Engineers. They shared more than a few customer request stories with me that simply put me on the floor. Know LT does an absolutely excellent job of supporting their customers with samples, design help and even reviewing board layouts and customer designs as added customer value. What they are actually doing is much of the design work customers cannot do or are not able to do. Much the same was echoed by a friend who is a FAE at Ti.
This conversation supports the realty that so much of "electronics design" aka hardware design has become cook book implementations of chip sets, demo-boards and similar. Any wonder why most electronic widgets today are so similar in so many ways
Another friend is a lab aid at Stanford Uni, he told me the majority of the students are allergic to solder
There was a time when being an EE meant doing the entire design from start to finish, at the individual component level (this means two and three legged devices or more legged devices), directing how pc boards components are places and traces routed out, how the item is to be built-produced, how it must be tested and define what the end specifications are. It was then up to marketing to sell it. Today, that as all been turned around to where marketing dictates what engineering will design, to what level of performance, what degree of being "bug free", what it's service live will be and when it will be tossed into the land fill.
What much of "electronics design" today has become code writing for cook book - generic chip sets that are designed by a given manufacture for a specific market need.
Much of this is reflected in the instrumentation designed and built today as they are computer centric, virtual in most cases and has become very much design by keyboard, mouse, software simulations and mostly by visual display.
Friends who have graduate degrees (Masters, Phd) tend to start their own companies and shy away from working at a corporation or work at a small start up company.
In light of all this, what does a college degree in EE really mean today beyond meeting the HR requirements and becoming a cog in the machinery?
There was a time when engineers held the equal to an executive position with real authority on the companies product offerings or they were responsible for the technical out come of a project. Today, many EEs have been relegated to cook book design to meet a schedule dictated by marketing and management that often results in half-baked products that barely meet customer expectations and intended to be obsolete in shot time forcing the customer to make another purchase.. This might the "good" for the economy and corporate profits, but it is not good for the customer and how humanity is using resources overall.
Bernice
The dirty little secret that nobody tells the undergrads is that almost all design these days is cookie cutter datasheet stuff, sure I can design a switched mode supply from component level without ICs, but why on earth would I want to?
Once in a blue moon you end up playing where the engineering meets the physics (That is fun), and very rarely you end up where the maths meets the physics (Scary place, also fun), but mostly it is cookie cutter data sheet stuff, the valuable skill is mostly up at the systems level, and knowing how the unwritten assumptions about whatever the task domain is will interact with the electronics.
Regards, Dan.
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