Designing Analog Chips

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1. PhaseLockkMay 2026
   You can learn about the origin of the 555 timer from its creator in his free book here: http://www.designinganalogchips.com/

   Fun fact: his original concept needed 9 pins and therefore was going be forced to have a 14 pin package. A late epiphany got it down to the 8 pin version we know today.

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2. 082349872349872Oct 2024
   You might be interested in http://www.designinganalogchips.com ...
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3. kragenDec 2023
   btw the sn7400 is already a fairly advanced ic; something like an uln2003 is closer to 'the simplest real world integrated circuit'

   probably the best place to start for this, in a top-down sequence, is the art of electronics by horowitz and hill. it explains how transistors and diodes act in §1.6, §2, and §3, initially explaining transistors with the simplified 'current amplifier' model (which already goes beyond the 'transistor switch' model you're thinking of), then quantitatively with the ebers–moll model; they're focused on how to use this information to design working circuits from discrete components you can put together on a circuit board. camenzind's designing analog chips (available free online) goes into how to use this information to design actual chips (not only does nand2tetris get into things like metastability and noise margin, the authors seem to be confused about what a chip even is, thinking you can make a chip by assembling other chips)

   but the ebers–moll model is still not solid-state physics knowledge. so far the best overview i've found of that is madou's 'fundamentals of microfabrication and nanotechnology' which has a couple of chapters about solid-state physics, going into the historical development of quantum mechanics. but it's not really a quantum mechanics textbook; it's just an overview that shows where quantum-mechanical knowledge fits into understanding solid-state physics

   'the feynman lectures on physics' is the best quantum mechanics textbook i've found so far, but because my knowledge of quantum mechanics is even more minimal, please don't trust my recommendation on this

   hope this helps. good luck in your learning voyage!

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4. tubetimeDec 2023
   for analog IC design, i highly recommend the excellent Designing Analog Chips[1] written by the person who designed the 555 timer. other books are more comprehensive and will give you all the theory, but this book is concise, practical, and free (at least for the pdf version).

   [1] http://www.designinganalogchips.com/

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5. kensJan 2022
   I stick to ICs from the 1970s and 1980s; after that, things get too hard to understand. Books from that era provide a reasonable description.

   For digital circuits, Mead and Conway's Introduction to VLSI Systems is a good source of information. It's available online: https://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/VLSIText/VLSITe... (the link seems to be down right now, though.)

   For analog circuits, the book "The Art of Analog Layout" is good if you can find a cheap used copy. The designer of the 555 timer wrote an interesting book "Designing Analog Chips" which I found very interesting. It is available online: http://www.designinganalogchips.com/

   There's also an online tutorial on IC reverse engineering: http://siliconzoo.org/tutorial.html

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6. kragenJan 2022
   Hans Camenzind, the 555 designer, devoted most of a chapter in http://designinganalogchips.com/ to the 555; the beginning of chapter 11 tells the story of how it was born, and then he tells you how he'd design it "now" (02005, 17 years ago and 34 years after it originally came out, though I think he published one of the redesigns in 01997), either in bipolar or in CMOS, and, more importantly, why; and some helpful tips on how to debug oscillator designs in simulation.

   At first I didn't see this, but Ken linked Camenzind's book in the article footnotes. It's highly regarded and free online.

   Shirriff's schematics are a lot nicer-looking than Camenzind's. I don't know what software Camenzind was using to draw his schematics, but despite being well organized and laid out, they are superficially rebarbative, almost as bad as KiCad's. Square dots, bright red transistors contrasting with bright green wires, barbed arrows on transistors, collectors intersecting with emitters at the base (or, randomly, not), active-low overbars that are the wrong length, resistors full of 90-degree angles and only four corners, no line width variation, P-channel MOSFETs with the arrow overlapping a wire-connection dot, MOSFET gates too far from the rest of the MOSFET, text overlapping wires, u for μ, etc. The effect is as if he did every schematic in Comic Sans.

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