Acknowledgments#
This book is the spin-off of workshops I have given and the design projects I have participated in over the past 35 years. Writing such a book is never the result of one person’s effort. I am indebted to many people I cooperated with and the many students I have taught. They taught and inspired me, and they have contributed in their very own way to its creation.
The design approach for analog electronic signal processing systems, presented in this book, was suggested around 1987 by Dr. Ir. Ernst H. Nordholt. At that time, we both cooperated in educating circuit designers around Europe. Ernst suggested that analog electronic signal processing systems could be designed with a limited number of basic information-processing functions and references. As a result of the fundamental physical limitations of information processing, and due to technological limitations, their performance would deviate from that of their idealized function concepts. The number of signal processing errors, however, could be reduced through the application of a limited number of so-called error-reduction techniques. Limitation of both the number of basic functions and the number of techniques that can be exploited for their improvement helps to solve day-to-day design problems in a structured way and facilitates circuit design education. Moreover, it can be a basis for partial automation of the complex design process.
In the subsequent years, developed design courses based on this approach. In our day-to-day design work, we applied and improved this design method. I am very grateful to have cooperated with Ernst and to be inspired by him. Without this cooperation, this book would not have been written.
Despite my interest in signal processing, during my education in analog electronics, I was primarily focused on all kinds of aspects of circuit design. I am therefore very grateful to have cooperated with Dr. Ir. Huib Dane. His ability to explain complex topics from statistical signal processing helped me with my professional development and inspired me in developing training courses for the design education of professionals.
It has been a pleasure and honor to work together with Catena Microelectronics in Delft. Since 1999 this company offered me the possibility to educate their novice analog IC designers, and in this way, it contributed very much to the development of this material.
I am also very grateful to cooperate with The High-Tech Institute and Ir. Hans Vink. Since 2010. They organize my training courses, which allows me to spend my time teaching, serving my customers, and writing this book.
A special word of gratitude is reserved for my friend Dr. Ir. Jan Deiman. I am indebted to him for the pleasant conditions he offered me in his guest house in Bali, which facilitated the writing of this book in a most inspiring way.
I also want to thank Ir. Dr. Chris Verhoeven from the TU Delft for offering me the opportunity to coach students during the execution of their master thesis and for giving guest lectures and masterclasses at the TU Delft. Cooperation with him very much encouraged me to complete this work. Thanks to him, this book is now used for teaching Structured Electronics Design at the Delft University of Technology and, I have the pleasure of working with him. Our conversations about the structured design method, orthogonality, basic functions, and error reduction techniques, were very inspiring.
I also had many fruitful discussions about this material with Ir. Jeroen van Duivenbode, a fellow at the TU Eindhoven. He inspired me in writing the MATLAB version of SLiCAP and contributed the name servo function used in this book. I would like to thank Jeroen for this contribution and our pleasant and inspiring cooperation.
While working with this book, many students gave me valuable feedback. I am very grateful for their contributions and encourage everyone to inform me about errata and future improvements.
Edition 3, June 2023
Delft, The Netherlands
Anton Montagne