One of my favorite analog gurus is the featured engineer today on EEWeb: Dr. Kent Lundberg. I’ve mentioned Kent here before because of his amazing “Reading Jim Williams” blog. Dr. Lundberg is an accomplished analog designer and teacher in his own right, and an all-around interesting guy. This nugget from the interview is my favorite:
Due to my background in control systems, I find feedback loops in everything. This approach has served me well. Feedback is the most useful and important tool in engineering. Every system that you encounter as an engineer — every system that you use, design, buy, or fix — uses feedback in some form, either intentionally or unintentionally, either explicitly or implicitly. Understanding a little feedback theory is key to understanding the things that you can do to create, build, repair, and improve systems that exploit feedback. One of my colleagues once said that “feedback is so fundamentally important that analog engineers who don’t understand it should be legally barred from circuit design,” and I agree!
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I think that medicine would be much better if doctors had a course in feedback systems. The body is loaded with them.