Dan Sheingold of Analog Devices wrote:
1. Hardware design, even of digital circuits, is inherently analog design, albeit not always with the textbook building blocks, but always with the challenges.
2. Good analog engineers generally are self-selected as a pool of guys/gals who like to tinker with hardware.
3. My understanding of the conventional engineering college curriculum is that it has become more and more rarified in the direction of theory and software, not very attractive to these types.
4. High-school science fair participants tend to be hands-on types.
So---What if a university boldly and baldly offers a 3rd & 4th-year curriculum in the fun and headaches of designing and building electronic hardware, built around challenging hands-on projects? And advertises it as such to prospective students? The curriculum would include basic analog (including digital) circuit design, properties of components, lab instrumentation (bought and homemade), sources of degradation, distortion and interference in electronic circuits, plus lab
courses and a design project in each semester. And do bring in industry design and application engineers for an occasional guest lecture.
Stuart Smith of Elantec Semiconductor wrote:
I think no electronics students should be allowed to graduate until they can show that they can successfully find faults in circuits. This should be a required, practical (Lab) class, with no chance of graduating until the students get an “A”! No simulator tells you exactly where the problem is, no automated tester tells the test engineer what the problem was. Only a breadboard sometimes gives you help by means of smoke signals from the incorrectly hooked up or broken device!
Like fault finding, error analysis is another forgotten science. It used to be done a lot when simulators could not be used to check for every permutation of process variations, supply voltage, temperature, component tolerances, etc