March 27, 1997

For design; by design

EDN's contents start with a philosophy. We believe engineers are the most qualified people to talk technology with engineers.

We've got an identity problem. Lots of people think EDN is an abbreviation for "Electronic Design News." Big-time mistake. Although we cover electronic design better than anyone else does, we don't do news. Several years ago, EDN ran a contest and asked readers to suggest a suitable expansion for the letters "EDN." We got a bunch of really good entries. One that the editors particularly liked (because it accurately described our work here) was "Every Damn Night."

Turns out, when EDN was launched 41 years ago, there wasn't much of an electronics industry. The bigger market was in electrical products and technologies. So, the magazine's original name was Electrical Design News. But the old EDN didn't do news either. Today, we cover the exploding field of electronics, so the old name wouldn't be accurate on either topic or news fronts. The new name, which is obviously an abbreviation of the old name, gets rid of the news and electrical connections, but doesn't suggest what is contained within the covers.

EDN's contents start with a philosophy. We believe engineers are the most qualified people to talk technology with engineers. So we hire only degreed EEs with practical engineering experience to be our technical editors. They are chartered to provide technical depth, insight, and analysis in all of their articles.

But just hiring the best editors isn't enough. Some experts claim that, with the rapid-fire advances in technology under way today, the half-life of your technical knowledge is less than five years. So, EDN encourages our editors not only to talk to other engineers and read voraciously, but also to undertake "hands-on" technical projects as a sort of mental "spring cleaning." These projects let our engineers/editors jump into the middle of the battle and define and solve a technical problem using the products, tools, and techniques that you use on a daily basis. Although these "hands-on" articles are exceptionally difficult, time-consuming, and challenging, we've got five or six of them planned for this year. In fact, there is a "hands-on" article about ADCs in this issue (EDN Hands-On Project: Demystifying ADCs).

You can't afford to waste much time thinking about products that may not be available for three or four product generations. We believe that, with your design cycles averaging six to nine months, you read EDN to learn how to solve your current design problems. That's why we write about products that are available now or that will be in the near future.

The same philosophy of helping you guides our feature-article style and Web-site development. When we write about a product, we take a "pins-out" approach that largely treats the product as a black box. We let you know what stimuli the box accepts and what outputs the box produces, without wasting too much time explaining the neat technology problems that the manufacturer solved in creating the box. Writing about the manufacturer's creativity in developing the part certainly is interesting, but unless you are a competitor of that manufacturer, the information isn't particularly useful. Here's a terrific analogy: It's like me whipping out my wallet and showing you pictures of my kids. They're pretty cute to me, but of little interest to you. We don't let any manufacturers pull out their kids' pictures in EDN.

Have you seen our Web site, www.ednmag.com? EDN's efforts to help you led us to create a site with the full editorial content of the current issue and an archive going back three years. We've also given you access to a new-product database and a free-software library on the site. Several projects in development will bear fruit in the next couple of months to further increase the site's utility.

EDN also aims to be comprehensive. That's why our cover stories offer broad product and technology overviews that contain all of the vendors we can identify that offer products meeting the article's qualifications. Take a look at the schematics we publish, too. They detail part and pin numbers and give you enough information to reproduce the circuit, if you want. In addition, we want our Design Ideas to be completely accurate, so we use paid consultants--among them the illustrious Bob Pease--to evaluate the entries. For entertainment, we offer Dilbert, whose insights and observations are without peer.

Drop us a note and let us know how we're doing.

Michael C Markowitz, Editor in Chief Let me know what you think. Send me your comments via fax at (617) 558-4470 or over the Internet at ednmarkowitz@mcimail.com or m.markowitz@cahners.com.

| EDN Access | Feedback | Table of Contents |