Microelectronics

What Hacker News says

1. cryo32Jul 2026
   Garbage -> Sedra and Smith particularly - hate it, anything which kicks you in the nuts right up front with Laplace and networks abstractions, anything from Pearson - have never seen a good one.

   Good -> Razavi (Fundamentals of Microelectronics), Art of Electronics, most Jim Williams stuff (AN's and articles), Bowick RF Circuit design. They're actually useful.

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2. WillSlim95Mar 2021
   I have some recommendations for you as an EE graduate, you can club Digital Circuits and Systems, Embedded Systems and Digital Hardware with one book in one continuous course with

   the book Digital Design and Computer Architecture by Harris and Harris (A RISC V Edition will release soon in 2-3 months, buy that one)

   For Electronic circuits choose Microelectronics by Behzad Razavi. Instead of Purcell go for "Engineering Electromagnetics with Ida", it is more intuitive.

   And th first book you should start with is "Foundations of Analog and Digital Electronic Circuits"

   Then you go for DDCA and Ida in parallel.

   The list does give me head scrather, this is too broad to be ever accomplished. My recommendation to redo the list is first find out what piques your interest in EE, Digital hardware, analog hardware or control systems or embedded systems and try to have a self study focus in that concentration.

   The way I see it with this plan you are setting yourself up for failure.

   Edit:Removed the ditching recommendation as I see it relevant to OP's goals.

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3. thedirt0115Apr 2018
   How in depth are you wanting to learn, and how do you like to learn?

   You can build some cool stuff without having much in depth knowledge (there are tons of step-by-step projects for Arduino/RaspberryPi just a Google away).

   If you're the type that doesn't mind hunkering down and reading textbooks, I'd suggest Electric Circuits (Nilsson and Riedel) paired with Fundamentals of Microelectronics (Razavi).

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4. subotoOct 2026
   For the amount of marketing and praise this book has gotten, I’m very unimpressed. I don’t mean it to come across snobbish. I just don’t see a take that’s in any way out of the usual.

   While I don’t expect one book to teach it all, I would like to see how it compares to the current crop of books and why is it better. The sample chapter left me very unimpressed and the book looks like it’s meant to be more for a coffee table and less for actual hands on usage. I don’t see a way that someone would put this into practice without an accompanying practice/lab book. Otherwise, it reads like trivia that showcases how much the author knows. Great, I guess?

   Speaking of covers, Open Circuits: Inner Beauty of Electronics has a much more honest yet intelligent cover to it. Each page is both informational and extremely well done. Someone who has no knowledge of electronics or electricity can walk away learning something because it shows how things physically work with photos. The visual itself is almost self explanatory as a still image of different materials and how they are arranged. In other words, it has information density that’s both attractive and impactful.

   My actual picks, are the likes of Floyd or Melvino, the Charles Platt one that has loads of circuits to build, and of course the clumsy but informative Forrest Mims series of books. Then you can get into Elicia White’s Embedded or any other assortment of more advanced books on power electronics etc.

   Open to be proven wrong but yeah. I would have expected more because I don’t know of any book on this subject other than Art of Electronics and maybe Microelectronics by Sedra (or Razavi) that gets this much praise. Yet it started getting this praise before it was even released.

   Bashing AI is fun except even good old Sam Ben-Yaakov is coming around to appreciate how useful it is to pedagogy.

   I remain skeptical.

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5. magicsmokeAug 2020
   Specializing in hardware design is really a poison pill despite how interesting the field is. You spend more than a decade in school to gain the skills needed to work at the chip level, which often requires a PhD. Then it turns out that there's only a handful of companies in the world with the equipment or supporting personnel needed for the field, and your skills are worthless outside of these specialized environments. No wonder pay is so low despite the years of schooling needed. After going through those considerations, I ended up dropping out of a PhD in RFIC design and fell back to embedded systems. More companies hiring and versatile enough to slide into general software or web programming if necessary. Chip design is still fascinating, but all traps look nice on the outside.

   Also, for any aspiring undergrads wandering this way that thought RFIC design was fascinating because they picked up a copy of Razavi's "RF Microelectronics" or something similar and couldn't help but read it cover from cover, the textbooks lie. The analytical equations in a chip design textbook are not reflective of what the actual process is like. While you're still in college, try and get a professor to give you a student addition of Keysight ADS or Microwave Office AWR, along with an SDK from a fab. Then spend a few months of simulation time to see for yourself how much simulated results diverge from analytical models and how painstakingly slow it is to optimize those simulations especially once you start moving into EM simulations. And keep in mind these are simulations, chances are the physical chip will diverge even more due to process variations, unknown parasitics, or even bad simulation models from the fab. If the lack of precision, simulation time, and general drudgery doesn't kill your enthusiasm when compared to your textbook learning, then by all means proceed.

   It's still a fascinating subject. Every so often when I need a break from code I'll take out my old RFIC textbooks and read a chapter or two. But you really don't want to know how this sausage is actually made.

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