Blog posts by jkvasan

The blog “”Battle of the engineers” was quite interesting.  While I could notice diverse views in reader’s comments, I was also curious to know that most of them were united in saying – there are fundamentally two types of engineers – hardware and software.

Day by day, the density of components integrated into chips is increasing as the performance whereas power consumption levels are nose-diving. When large scale integration is yesterday’s buzz word, very large scale integration is today’s mantra.

Chips have become general purpose and it depends on the designer and the end application to decide how they want it to perform. The designer programs the chip to suit the application requirements.  Does this therefore mean that the designer is a software engineer?

If so, how do they know that the chip will function as required? Will things like the power levels and the necessary PCB layout techniques be taken into account? How is the hardware designed to comply to EMC/EMI standards?  Does this therefore mean that our designer is in fact a hardware engineer?

I think the answer could be that the designer could actually be both?  So this asks the question, “What do we call somebody who knows both?”  Like in cricket, where we have bowler, batsman and all-rounder, can we call the designer an “All-ware” engineer?

Where do we draw the line? Or is the line really necessary?

Sooner or later, every engineer, willingly or unwillingly needs to know a bit of software and hardware - the percentage … Read more

An electronics or embedded engineer should not limit themselves to writing firmware. Having thorough knowledge on hardware empowers the designer to understand what is happening and take the right path.

For example, the firmware written could be world-class, yet it may not stop an ADC count from oscillating whereas a simple decoupling capacitor may.  Before starting the building, one needs to properly lay down the foundations. Hardware is the base on which firmware lies, so this needs to be fundamentally right and stable.

Proper circuit design, topology and PCB routing is essential for any subsequent process to take us through further.

Points mentioned below may enhance the performance of the design while cutting the testing time shorter by making the process more convenient.

Plan from day one

1. Make a list of components you use often in your design. This could be your standard molex connectors, 0805  
package resistors, crystals, etc. This list must contain all the standard components that you may use and those you might have used at least once in your career so far. It would be also helpful, if you could get the datasheets containing footprints of these components, wherever necessary. Read more

Paul's blog deals nicely on several aspects on multi-tasking. Read more

Recap….

In the previous part, thoughts were on components that make a UI

Part III : Screen Real Estate – Information Display

Crux of it…

Displaying numbers and other information..

Now that we have so many types of displays, focused thinking on the way of putting information onto the displays is order of the day.

  Read more