Digital Circuit Design: Fill & Download for Free

These two engineering areas are significantly different in objectives, knowledge, skills and deliverables.ObjectivesAnalog circuits deal with continuous time signals. You design analog circuit to generate, detect, measure, amplify, attenuate or filter a signal that resembles signals exist naturally (hence the name analog), such as a sound wave or a temperature curve.Digital circuits deal with discrete time quantities with only two values: 0 and 1. You design digital circuits to do mathematical analysis and logic processing based on Boolean Algebra.Mixed-signal circuits go in between analog and digital, deal with analog to digital and digital to analog conversion, which requires engineers from both disciplines to work together, or sometimes someone knows both as a mixed-signal circuit designer.There is also a special area of analog design that deals with radio frequency signals, which is often referred to as RF circuit design in the industry.KnowledgeAnalog circuit designer knows about semiconductor technology, semiconductor physics, semiconductor device physics, electrical circuit theory, control and feedback.Digital circuit designer knows about Boolean algebra, linear algebra, digital signal processing, synchronous and asynchronous system.SkillsAnalog circuit designer needs to be familiar with EDA tools such as: SPICE (and its variants SPECTRE, HSPICE etc.) for circuit simulation, schematic and layout editor tools such as Virtuoso and Galaxy.Digital circuit designer needs to be able to use behavior level design language such as Verilog or HDL, needs to be able to simulate with RTL level netlists, needs to be able to perform synthesis with Design Compiler, needs to be able to run timing analysis to sign-off.DeliverablesAnalog designer designs amplifiers, oscillators, continuous time filters, mixers, power supply regulators, A/D converters, D/A converters.Digital designer designs logic gates, latches, counters, adders, multipliers, FIR filters, micro-controllers.Rumor has it that analog designer makes more than his counterpart doing digital design, it is probably true.

Analog Circuits:These circuits operate on continuous valued signals(commonly referred to as analog signals).Analog circuits are difficult to design since each component has to be placed by hand as automation techniques for designing these circuits fail to do the job efficiently.No conversion of input signals are required before processing i.e. input signal is analog, the circuit directly performs various logical operations and produces an analog output.In analog circuits, since there are no conversions involved at the input or at the output side there is no loss of information that is available for processing.The man power available to design analog circuits is very low, this results in long time to market the finished products.Analog circuits are mostly custom made and lacks flexibility.Digital Circuits:These circuits operate on signals that exist only at two levels i.e. 0's and 1's (binary number system).On the other hand digital circuits are easy to design since automation technique can be applied at various levels of circuit design. This involves minimum human interaction.In digital circuits, the input signals are converted from analog to digital form before it is processed, i.e. the digital circuit is capable of processing digital signals only, and produces output which is again converted back from digital to analog signals so that the output gives meaning full results that can be understood by humans.Due to the conversion process at the input side(analog to digital) and at the output side, some amount of information is lost during the conversion process.The available man power to design digital circuits is significantly large compared to that of analog circuit designers.Digital circuits have high degree of flexibility.

Hello,Maxim Integrated is a reputed company in the field of Analog & Mixed-Signal Circuit Design, While companies like Apple makes End-Products using them.Intel has the best technology in Digital Circuit Technology while Maxim has the best technology in Analog Circuit Design.If you are interested in Circuit designing, Core Electronics, Semiconductor Manufacturing, this is the place for you.