Small computers doing one job, usually with no operating system to help.
13 topics · 14 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Lessons in Electric Circuits, Volume III – Semiconductors
Tony R. Kuphaldt · 2002
Builds diode and transistor behaviour up from solid-state intuition — depletion regions, carrier flow — rather than from datasheet equations, aiming…
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits
Gordon E. Moore · 1965
Predicts that the number of components per integrated circuit will keep doubling roughly every year from the economics of integration, not any…
+7 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits
Claude E. Shannon · 1938
Shows that Boolean algebra can represent any network of relays or switches, turning circuit design and simplification into algebraic manipulation…
+4 more at this level
12 of 14 works
Tony R. Kuphaldt
Builds diode and transistor behaviour up from solid-state intuition — depletion regions, carrier flow — rather than from datasheet equations, aiming to give a newcomer the same working model an engineer carries.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Gordon E. Moore
Predicts that the number of components per integrated circuit will keep doubling roughly every year from the economics of integration, not any specific physical limit, founding the roadmap the whole industry then organised its planning around.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Robert A. Pease
Argues that most analog hardware failures are found through measurement discipline and scepticism of your own assumptions rather than simulation, and demonstrates the habits of a working troubleshooter.
Texas Instruments
Argues that most electromagnetic-interference problems are decided by layout choices — return-path geometry, decoupling placement — made before a schematic is ever routed, not by component selection afterwards.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Analog Devices
Works through real sensor-interfacing problems — bridges, thermocouples, strain gauges — arguing that the conditioning circuit, not the sensor itself, usually sets a system's real accuracy.
Jack S. Kilby
Recounts building the first working integrated circuit by fabricating every component of an electronic circuit from a single piece of semiconductor, arguing the decisive step was refusing to assume that resistors and capacitors had to be separate discrete parts.
Ron Mancini
Works from the real, non-ideal behaviour of an operational amplifier — bandwidth, offset, slew rate — arguing that most analog design mistakes come from applying the ideal op-amp equations past where they actually hold.
link checked 17 Sept 2026James K. Roberge (MIT OpenCourseWare)
Teaches microcontroller design as a combined hardware-and-firmware problem by having students build a complete closed-loop motor controller from a bare processor upward, rather than treating the two as separate courses.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Gerard J. Holzmann
Argues that safety-critical firmware should deliberately give up generality — banning recursion, dynamic memory and unbounded loops — because a program that can be checked beats one that is merely flexible.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Claude E. Shannon
Shows that Boolean algebra can represent any network of relays or switches, turning circuit design and simplification into algebraic manipulation rather than trial-and-error wiring.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Frederick E. Terman
Assembles the working formulas and design charts of pre-digital radio engineering into a single reference, treating RF design as an empirical craft disciplined by measurement rather than pure field theory.
link failing as of 17 Sept 2026C. L. Liu & James W. Layland
Proves that assigning fixed task priorities by execution rate is optimal among static-priority schemes and derives a schedulability bound, replacing ad hoc real-time tuning with a provable test.
link checked 17 Sept 2026