During my analog apps engineering days, I never ceased to be amazed at how many systems engineers there were out there that thought analog to digital conversion was easy, just slap an A to D converter on the board and call it a day!
I just watched the latest video from the Analog by Design Reality Show by Bob Pease, and want to recommend it to everyone involved with anything that makes the analog and digital world meet.
National Semi is known as mecca for analog engineering, and Xylinx, for FPGAs and FPGA design.
What I always loved to pull my hair out over was switching power supplies, and they are most often the culprit when Signal to Noise ratios went south. In many systems I had to troubleshoot for Burr-Brown, we moved to Linear Regulators and the problems went away. LDOs or Low Drop Out regulators are great little chips that don't cost much, and don't create harmonics like PWM'ed switchers do.
This video also talks about low ESR capacitors, and high ESR capacitors and when you need 'em. Some ESR can be great to damp out ringing. But if you are designing a switcher, you want a low ESR capacitor. Otherwise, you have another pole in there somewhere that you don't want.
Another problem I saw far more than I should was Loooooong traces. Board traces have an inductance, messy boards do NOT typically have low noise floors.
All data lines also need to be the same length, so that data arrives at the same time unless you have multiple clocks.
As Bob says in this video - " Life ain't easy." You can say that again Bob.
But some of the greatest gratification I have ever had in my career was in finding a really tough bug, and kicking its butt!
I recommend this video series HIGHLY to anyone who is taking real world data and translating it to the digital world.
Well done guys!
