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Why are physicists the electronics experts?

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coppice:

--- Quote from: capt bullshot on August 21, 2020, 09:52:57 am ---Having understood the underlying physics helps to deal with many real-life electronics problems. Like EMC, noise, interference, efficiency, signal integrity, ...

--- End quote ---
You don't think an engineering degree covers that in great detail?

capt bullshot:

--- Quote from: coppice on August 21, 2020, 11:38:21 am ---
--- Quote from: capt bullshot on August 21, 2020, 09:52:57 am ---Having understood the underlying physics helps to deal with many real-life electronics problems. Like EMC, noise, interference, efficiency, signal integrity, ...

--- End quote ---
You don't think an engineering degree covers that in great detail?

--- End quote ---
Mine does. Had a lot of physics stuff to do (wasn't called physics, but rather fundamentals of electrical engineering or whatever the correct translation of "Grundlagen der Elektrotechnik" would be. This did weed out a lot of the people that started their EE studies at the same time I did. Can't speak for the modern BSEE or whatever degrees. To me they look rather small-time in these disciplines.

NivagSwerdna:

--- Quote from: Connecteur on August 20, 2020, 05:25:36 pm ---When I look up the answer to an electronics question online, it's often a physicist who is giving the answer.  Do they know more about electronics than someone who actually works with electronics?

--- End quote ---
Yes  ;)

filssavi:

--- Quote from: coppice on August 21, 2020, 11:38:21 am ---
--- Quote from: capt bullshot on August 21, 2020, 09:52:57 am ---Having understood the underlying physics helps to deal with many real-life electronics problems. Like EMC, noise, interference, efficiency, signal integrity, ...

--- End quote ---
You don't think an engineering degree covers that in great detail?

--- End quote ---

That is unfortunately not the case.

From what I have seen by working with universities around the world that used to be the case (and often still is) is Europe (Italy, Germany, etc.). Here the traditional teaching order is bottom up, starting with lots of math (complex functional analysis, linear algebra etc) physics, electromagnetism in particular, then device physics (pn junctions, BJT’s, MOS) and on from there.

This gives you amazing basis for research type work.

Unfortunately it’s been some time that we are importing the Top down approach from the US (the UK has been the first, however it is not the only one now). This starts from system level and goes down from there, often times completely neglecting physics, math and even how semiconductor devices work. In a “makery “ type of way.

This is obviously fine for 99.9% of the electronics type work (nobody needs to know the width of the space charge region for the mosfet turning on and off the Smart IOT lightbulb) and thus preferred by most companies ( it is faster and cheaper to train engineers that way) however for research (both academic and Company R&D) in Cutting edge fields, this is really sub-optimal (basically it requires the first year of the PhD to be used up in studying the theory that was skipped before.

Unfortunately we are now (some countries sooner, some later) importing the Top

FransW:
I can see the common sense and common denominators in the above discussion.

That is why I, after Applied Physics, went for Systems Engineering.
A more multi-disciplinary approach.
Never regretted this.

Frans

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