[someguydave]

It definitely depends on what you want to do. If you really want to design RF or analog circuits, having a mastery of undergrad EE signals and systems courses would be helpful. But if you only want to make digital logic work, you only need some basic knowledge of circuitry.

EE is a vast field that encompasses everything from high power transmission to designing semiconductors. Even full course work from undergrad to PhD in EE is going to be fairly specialized.

All that being said, I agree that if you just want to learn how to build a catalog of reasonably simple circuits, learning academic EE is a waste of time.

[sleavey]

> analog circuits

Can you expand on how analog electronics benefits in particular from a formal EE education? I build analog circuits (amplifiers, filters, power supplies mostly) very frequently in my job as a physicist. We have to care about noise so I've picked up a knowledge of how to deal with it in analog circuits. Is there some other area of analog electronics that "hackers" like me might not get exposed to, compared to an EE undergrad? I'm thinking of moving into EE and would like to work out the gaps in my knowledge. I also ask because I can see obvious reasons why your other example - RF electronics - would benefit from formal training but none for analog electronics.

[Junk_Collector]

Physics and EE have a lot of overlap and exposure to analog circuits in undergrad is pretty shallow. There will typically be a class that covers RLC and switched circuits in time and frequency domain and the basic uses of amplifiers and filters. After that it's theory applied from Fourier analysis and control theory and then they'll have a class on semiconductor physics and another that covers basic amplifier design. These days a lot of focus is on integrated chip design instead of board design. As far as most board level design these days, someone coming from a physics background will pick it up just fine on the job or in the lab as long as you have solid fundamentals.

More advanced stuff that you probably lack vs a practicing EE or an EE graduate education is going to be edge cases, advanced stability analysis, translinear logic and exposure to all the different types of component design. There are tons of different types of say amplifiers used in specific applications whereas most people working in a lab just slap opAmps on everything. A lot of advanced analog design is just applied control theory. Also keep in mind that these days Digital, RF, and Analog all blur a lot in a cutting edge design environment.

Quick Edit: A lot of the more traditional EE design companies will consider someone with a physics degree to be equivalent to someone with an EE degree unless they are looking for a very specific niche.

[sleavey]

Thanks for the reply! Happy to hear they might consider my physics background. Stability is another thing I have to deal with a lot.

[someguydave]

Probably not. I'm thinking of things like Laplace transforms and their relationship to differential equations, and stability analysis for things like amp feedback. Most of that you should have gotten academically in physics, just with a more specialized application when applying it to how you model an inductor or capacitor for instance.

But if you can design an amplifier or power supply, you probably already understand how to think of all the basic circuit elements and write down a differential equation modeling the circuit behavior.

With respect to RF, it's also a large field. In lower frequency regimes you can model everything as a lumped circuit element. As you get into higher microwave frequencies, you start needing to worry about modeling things as a distributed circuit. If you are focusing on things like antennas then you need to know more about electromagnetics. These days practicing engineers dealing with things like antennas and feedlines typically model them with computers. In some ways RF analog circuitry is disappearing as ADCs and associated digital circuitry are becoming advanced enough to swallow large bandwidth signals.

In many ways EE is pretty close to "applied physics", just focusing more on emag and less on mechanics.

[sleavey]

I don't tend to dig down into equations and just use the simple heuristics I've built up from examining other designs. I guess with a bit of practice I could do it though. Thanks for the info!