|
ColumnistFebruary 3, 1997 |
Kids these days.
I hear the complaints from my middle-aged electronics friends. "New engineering graduates know nothing about electronics." "They have no feel for what circuits should and shouldn't do." "As designers, they require years of apprenticeship before becoming productive." This, of course, wasn't true when we were kids. Nah. From the moment we entered the workforce, we were the gurus of digital, delighting employers and amazing our colleagues.
Hogwash.
I remember making dramatic mistakes, some from sheer ignorance, others due to the lack of common sense that comes with bitter experience. My boss somehow tolerated these missteps and put up with the arrogance of youth, giving me a chance to mature and develop an understanding of the industry.
Times were very different, though, and many of us came into engineering with at least some grounding in basic electronics. We might have been immature and undisciplined, but at least we had some feel for what electrons were likely to do.
Why? Ham radio. Like so many others of the time, I got my first ham license at age 16. Being a poor teenager, the latest shiny technology was financially out of reach, so I was forced to build my own equipment. A national Apollo-era fascination with all things technical helped groom youngsters like me for an electronics career long before entering college.
Most of us novice hams had access to an infinite supply of cheap surplus electronics gear. Vacuum tubes were the state of the surplus art, which was not a bad thing, because high-power RF transistors were simply too expensive for teenage radio buffs.
My pals and I created tons of hi-fi amplifiers, transmitters, and power supplies, some of which actually worked. In fact, the best radio contact of my high-school career was acknowledged by an angry letter from the FCC, which had picked up my signal on the second harmonic, clear across the USA. I was so proud of that 3000-mile transmission that the pink letter stayed prominently displayed on the wall for several years.
Our bible, The Radio Amateurs Handbook, contained plenty of schematics and construction tips. Even kids with no formal electronics training could quickly master a transmitter design that required no more than five tubes. In the process we learned a lot about what worked and what didn't. No one needed expensive test equipment. Scopes were rare till we got older; a homemade voltmeter sufficed for most troubleshooting.
When money was available, we ordered electronics kits from Heathkit and others. Detailed, step-by-step instructions more or less guaranteed success and increased our confidence. You could build a TV, stereo, ham radio, or practically any electronic device from these kits and wind up with a device that equaled any commercial product. Many of today's older engineers learned basic electronics via these hands-on projects, then went to college to formalize their knowledge.
But ham radio, although still a popular hobby, is a victim of the electronics revolution. Most hams buy their equipment now, because it's just too hard to build your own. Years ago, we worked almost exclusively on trivially simple AM gear. Today, SSB and FM dominate; both require much more sophisticated receivers and transmitters—equipment far beyond the construction abilities of the average teenage wannabe. A decent radio is expensive enough to be a barrier to young folks, and the act of purchasing, rather than building, limits the educational experience.
The history of computers followed a similar path. Amateurs grew fascinated with the technology, acquired parts by hook or crook, and built their own very useful machines. An industry grew up to service these devoted homebrewers. Apple and IBM, though, finally provided machines that no one could duplicate in his basement in a reasonable amount of time. High integration and escalating complexity killed off the hands-on building experience. Today, building a computer means bolting together a motherboard, disks, and other modules. There's neither opportunity nor need to learn about the electronics.
Youngsters enjoy learning by doing more than by studying. But the "doing" part is awfully difficult today, unless you want to build equipment that is so behind the state of the art that it's a joke.
How satisfying would it be for a kid to spend weeks building a computer that could not equal the 100-MHz Pentium he's got on his desk? Sure, it's interesting to put things together and see them work. It's hard to get passionate, though, about a field where you can never approach the state of the art.
So, our kids must turn to software. It's the last great area where they can make something that works, at their own pace, and in their own way. They can wrestle with the computer, just as so many of us wrestled with a soldering iron, and produce something through their own creativity.
Computer programming is a highly desirable skill. These computer wizards will become skilled and productive CS people, but possibly not EEs. Where will we get the future crop of electronics designers?
Even now it's getting harder to find good designers. Far too many embedded people have little knowledge of basic electronics. For instance, I recently worked with a group of embedded experts who had no idea what to do about their overheating three-terminal voltage regulator. Too many digital folks forget that electronic circuits (not gates), with electronic properties, are what we work with.
Is basic electronics obsolete? Has Boolean algebra replaced Kirchoff's Law? Is digital engineering immune to pedantic electronics concerns? Perhaps the benign clock rates of embedded designs in the '70s and '80s insulated us from the underlying yet critical physics of circuits. Colleges, in many ways, created a generation of "computer engineers" who are adept at software and high-level design, but who are adrift when confronted with a component's transfer function.
The good news is that schools now focus more on projects; few engineers graduate without completing a significant senior project. The bad news is that the projects are always computer systems; again, the electronics is neglected. Furthermore, a three-credit class does not provide enough time to get the feel for the circuits that a great engineer exhibits. Just as no one becomes good at a programming language until he or she cranks out 10,000 or more lines of code in that language, designers need to spend a lot of time making and fixing mistakes before becoming proficient at their art.
I worry that our profession is drifting too far from its roots, that "embedded design" seems to be a subject taught and practiced independent of the electronics it relies on. Increasing speeds and the decreasing margins of low-voltage logic are already bringing basic electronics back to the forefront; will we be knowledgeable enough to deal with it?
 |
Jack Ganssle is the president of Softaid, a vendor of emulators and other embedded-systems tools. Contact him via Internet at jack@softaid.com or send mail to 8310 Guilford Road, Columbia, MD 21046. |
| EDN Access | Feedback | Subscribe to EDN | Table of Contents |