Ten Essential Skills for Electrical Engineers

Barry L. Dorr

• Publisher: Wiley-IEEE Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781118527429
• eBook ISBN: 9781118807682
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Engineering General
• Index: Technology & Engineering

The book is a review of essential skills that an entry-level or experienced engineer must be able to demonstrate on a job interview and perform when hired. It will help engineers prepare for interviews by demonstrating application of basic principles to practical problems. Hiring managers will find the book useful because it defines a common ground between the student's academic background and the company's product or technology-specific needs, thereby allowing managers to minimize their risk when making hiring decisions.

TenEssential Skills contains a series of "How to" chapters. Each chapter realizes a goal, such as designing an active filter or designing a discrete servo. The primary value of these chapters, however, is that they apply engineering fundamentals to practical problems. The book is a handy reference forengineers in their first years on the job.

• Enables recent graduates in engineering to succeed in challenging technical interviews
• Written in an intuitive, easy-to-follow style for the benefit of busy students and employers
• Book focuses on the intersection between company-specific knowledge and engineering fundamentals
• Companion website includes interview practice problems and advanced material

1

HOW TO DESIGN RESISTIVE CIRCUITS

Chances are good that every schematic diagram you’ve seen contained at least a few resistors. This component is an electrical workhorse, commonly used for establishing bias voltages, programming gain, summing signals, attenuating signals, and numerous other functions. Ideal resistors dutifully follow Ohm’s law, which has no frequency dependence, so it is easy to believe that designing with resistors is a simple task. This is probably the most common reason candidates are caught off guard and fail when asked to design simple resistive networks in interviews. This chapter will show you how to design and analyze practical resistive networks that solve problems you’ll encounter in interviews and in the workplace.

The resistor was probably the first component you studied in school. At that time, it was the only component in your toolset, so the problems you solved were limited to finding voltages and currents in DC networks. Doing these problems taught you valuable skills such as nodal and mesh analysis, but the problems were not particularly practical and perhaps not very interesting. As a graduating engineer your knowledge of circuit elements has broadened significantly and you have better computer tools to help with the mathematical manipulations. The examples and problems in this chapter should be much more interesting because they represent practical design problems; they should be more enjoyable because, after setting up the problems, we will rely on the computer for the brunt of the manipulations.

This chapter begins with the commonly asked interview problem of creating a voltage source with a specified Thevenin resistance. Since this is such a common problem, we derive equations so that you can easily compute the resistor values when you encounter it. Next, we design a coupling circuit with specific design requirements. Many experienced engineers design this circuit using an op-amp and numerous resistors, but you’ll see that a network with only three resistors fulfills the design requirement. We then design a 50 Ω bidirectional attenuator that is commonly found in RF circuits. This is not an easy problem, but it provides a good example of converting design requirements into solvable equations and then calculating the components. Since the attenuator design is a difficult problem, we check our result using mesh analysis, and you’ll see that analyzing resistive networks is simply a matter of writing the correct equations and then letting a matrix solver compute the solution.

1.1 DESIGN OF A RESISTIVE THEVENIN SOURCE

Designing circ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• About the Reviewers
• Note to Instructors
• 1: How to Design Resistive Circuits
• 2: How to Prevent a Power Transistor From Overheating
• 3: How to Analyze a Circuit
• 4: How to Use Statistics to Ensure a Manufacturable Design
• 5: How to Design a Feedback Control System
• 6: How to Work with OP-AMP Circuits
• 7: How to Design Analog Filters
• 8: How to Design Digital Filters
• 9: How to Work with RF Signals
• 10: Getting a Job—Keeping a Job—Enjoying Your Work
• Afterword
• Answers to Problems
• Index