Simulations do have their place, and they allow us to quickly try new things, without letting out the magic smoke.
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However, so many graduates these days are trained using simulation tools, without ever touching actual components, so it often comes as a bit of a shock to them, when they have their first industry placement, and have to start actually making things.
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The first challenge is to get them to be able to recognise parts, and the second is in acknowledging that there are various physical constraints that also have to be taken into consideration. Such as power dissipation and cooling, and in the case of RF, screening, stray coupling, including unaccounted for inductance and capacitance, which all need to be taken into account.
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It always used to amuse me when dealing with one particular make of broadcast transmitter, where individual sections had obviously been designed by graduate engineers, and the feedback around operational amplifier stages used non-standard value, 1% tolerance parts, even though they were intended to be simple, unity gain buffer stages.
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This should have really been spotted and sorted out during production engineering, but for some reason it never did.
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Regards,
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Martin
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On Fri, Feb 14, 2025 at 03:02 PM, Mike M wrote:
So simulation-based arguments may be interesting, but unless there is the built and tested prototype it is hard to know whether the simulations represent reality or not.
