The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

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#392 – An Interview with Matt Duff

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Welcome, Matt Duff! Matt is the Precision Web Tools manager at Analog Devices. Listeners to the show will recognize us talking about Matt’s videos about instrumentation amplifiers on YouTube.

 

 

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  1. just a quick note, was looking forward to listen to that interview. But to be honest I startedt like 5 years ago to be a profesional analog engineer, well more embedded engineering, but i taught myself a fair bit of tricks in the analog world.
    Thsoe webbased tools that come along simply do one thing, they hinder new fellas to gain a deep insight in the actual behaviour of circuits and they additionally lead to a very bad thing:
    New folks and guys who dont know a fair bit, think they can simply use anything to measure everything, and thanks to those tools in id say 60 % of the cases it will somehow also work in most cases, which does not lead to better measurments but simply to a slow degredation in knowledge and therefore products, everything becomes a little less stable, a little less understood, cause it tends to work very fast thanks to those tools and a good portion of half knowledge.

    So it is really difficult to decide wheather its a good thing or not, I think its pretty sad from the engineers view, liek Chris mentioned there are loads of students waiting to get a chance to work in those analog or whatever fields, guess who wont get a job, since one guy alone can handle the webpage and gets out his designs pretty fast…

    Of course this is a very two sided argument, but since this is a podcast from engineers for engineers id rather woul dlike to concentrate on critical things, like where is the quality going vs. hey everyone can do it now, lets all simply use arduions and pis for development…

    I would maybe judge different when those webbased tools indeed would generate a better quality in the end, but as I see it it simplifies things, which need deep understanding, at the end of the day engineering has to do with loads and loads of experience.

    cheers

    • Agree that this is a tough balance to strike. I think in the old days, it was a different scenario. Higher margins meant more engineers to work on things which meant more depth of knowledge and better designed/understood filters. Most places I hear about these days simply don’t have the money for more engineers, so the value is in offering these tools to them. Agree that they won’t have the depth of understanding, but they also won’t have the time to really care. At the end of the day, it’ll be the FAEs that are brought in to help (assuming there is sufficient money being spent to warrant a visit) that do the true understanding and fixing.

      That’s a damn pessimistic view of the industry, but it’s my best guess at why these things exist. If I were talking to a student, I wouldn’t necessarily point them towards these tools because like you said, it becomes an exercise in twiddling knobs vs understanding the underlying mechanisms. I would maybe start them with a tool like this so they have an overall understanding of what engineers might use on a day-to-day basis (vs what a textbook says is possible) and then push them off towards a bench and spice to verify the results and play around more. Outside of giving context though, I agree that this tool could be a bit of a hindrance if taken alone.