Calculas, Soldering and Electrical Engineering

[Martin Czech]

:::4. Soldering is a very very very very very small part of electrical
:::engineering. i agree that it is important that a engineer must know his way

well, may be it was meant in the direction of "getting hands on real
circuits".  Today we design in virtual worlds, that's true, but every
time a chip of mine comes out of the fab, I awake out of dreamland,
finding myself in the lab, soldering on loadboards, or little helpfull
circuits, and trying to get measurements with bandwidths well above
1GHz. The problem is, that complex circuits will always have bugs in
the beginning, the more mixed signal, the more bugs. Even synthesized
circuits have unexpected bugs, which is good fun to debug on the wafer,
cause now you don't understand the actuall circuits any more....

It takes as long to debug then to design a chip, so I really spend lots of
time in the lab, soldering, measuring, shmooing, swearing...

I have always found the people that have no soldering experience, ie.
never played with real circuits, have a very hard time in the design dept.,
they make the funniest measurements and believe in the shit they have measured,
they learn quickly, or be no longer with us....


m.c.