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I should have loved electrical engineering

(blog.tdhttt.com)
157 points tdhttt | 11 comments | 01 Sep 25 09:12 UTC | HN request time: 0.515s | source | bottom
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pclmulqdq ◴[04 Sep 25 10:58 UTC] No.45125831[source]▶
EE encompasses a lot of "engineering that takes hard math" at a professional and research level (similar to "hard CS," just different fields of math), so it is very hard to do as an undergrad, when your background in complex analysis and E&M is weak.

Early classes on circuits in EE will usually take shortcuts using known circuit structures and simplified models. The abstraction underneath the field of analog circuits is extremely leaky, so you often learn to ignore it unless you absolutely need to pay attention.

Hobbyist and undergrad projects thus usually consist of cargo culting combinations of simple circuit building blocks connected to a microcontroller of some kind. A lot of research (not in EE) needs this kind of work, but it's not necessarily glamorous. This is the same as pulling software libraries off the shelf to do software work ("showing my advisor docker"), but the software work gets more credit in modern academia because the skills are rarer and the building blocks are newer.

Plenty of cutting-edge science needs hobbyist-level EE, it's just not work in EE. Actual CS research is largely the same as EE research: very, very heavy on math and very difficult to do without studying a lot. If you compare hard EE research to basic software engineering, it makes sense that you think there's a "wall," but you're ignoring the easy EE and the hard CS.

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1. amelius ◴[04 Sep 25 11:51 UTC] No.45126229[source]▶
This is especially true because for doing most _hard_ EE work, you really need access to a fab, and so a lot of money. This is not really the case for most hard CS work.
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2. nudgeee ◴[04 Sep 25 12:03 UTC] No.45126321[source]▶
By fab you mean lab, then agree.

Fabs are specific to the manufacturing of integrated circuits.

EE encompasses more than just manufacturing of ICs, for example research and applications in radio propagation and EM/wireless, signal integrity, antenna design, coexistence/desense, advanced power electronics, control systems, simulation/solvers, etc.

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3. pclmulqdq ◴[04 Sep 25 12:08 UTC] No.45126341[source]▶
Fabs are only part of this, and not universal in EE research at all. However, almost all serious EE research requires at least $100k of lab equipment of one kind or another.
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4. sevensor ◴[04 Sep 25 12:17 UTC] No.45126394[source]▶
“Things you can only do in a fab” is but a subset of “hard problems in EE.” How many people actually understand induction motors well enough to design a better one? Or how about antenna theory? The math makes most people’s eyeballs melt, and the space of possible antenna designs is utterly unfathomably huge. And then there’s acoustics, which is just like antenna theory except the math is sideways. I could go on. Control theory. Analog signal processing. Digital signal processing. Biomedical.

I say all this as a recovering semiconductor engineer: EE is a huge field. I can’t think of a subdiscipline where we’ve run out of new ideas to explore, and most of them don’t require bucketfuls of HF. The real problem is that the financial rewards are relatively small, the math is ferocious, and there are so few practitioners, let alone experts doing research.

5. amelius ◴[04 Sep 25 12:17 UTC] No.45126396[source]▶
This is true, although for wireless applications you can follow the recommendations of the IC vendor and the remainder of the work is RF-engineering, not research. That's why I said fab, not lab. But yes, you are right to a great extent. The main point is that the hard EE work can be prohibitively expensive for individuals and smaller companies.
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6. pclmulqdq ◴[04 Sep 25 12:21 UTC] No.45126431{3}[source]▶
I think you're oversimplifying this. Lots of RF research is done with a DAC, an ADC, an FPGA, and a frontend made of discretes (sometimes also with off-the-shelf boxes connected with SMA connectors). A lot of power electronics research is done with microcontrollers and discrete parts. Digital circuits research often stops on an FPGA or in a simulator.

You can do a lot of actual original work without a fab.

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7. nudgeee ◴[04 Sep 25 12:53 UTC] No.45126701{3}[source]▶
Sibling poster did a good job explaining how research relies on labs.

Agree that complex EE work can be expensive for individual and smaller companies, indeed :)

A comment on the application side:

> "[..] for wireless applications you can follow the recommendations of the IC vendor and the remainder of the work is RF-engineering"

Zoom out to the system level, and you cannot just rely on IC vendor recommendations, and this kind of engineering can still require access to $$ labs.

Similar to complex software systems: for example take a large scale distributed system made out of many individual frameworks and services. The system as a whole may now exhibit emergent behaviour, and have failure modes due to the complexity of the system.

Same happens in complex EE designs, your design might pack in multiple cutting edge RF radios such as mmWave, UWB, with bespoke power amplifier, detection and antenna designs. Add in EM from multiple clock domains, high power distribution circuits, digital noise from FPGAs/CPUs, and EM from nearby sources. You can easily have noise couple from sources causing unintended issues in other subsystems. The vendor may say "keep a way from sources of noise", but your application may still be to engineer a solution that fits in the design envelope of a modern smartphone. The system level design needs to be engineered for EMC and coexist/desense, and validated which takes a ton of lab simulation and measurement/characterization work.

8. hwillis ◴[04 Sep 25 13:25 UTC] No.45127024[source]▶
Does radar or radar reflection not count as "hard"? There's a lot more to electronics and electrical engineering than ICs.
9. wildzzz ◴[04 Sep 25 14:04 UTC] No.45127417[source]▶
That's definitely an unfortunate part of EE, the hardware required to design hardware is expensive. CS requires a laptop and maybe some time on a server or a big GPU cluster, expensive to own but very cheap to rent.

I think the explosion in availability of inexpensive microcontrollers and FPGA dev boards have made it much easier for people to get into hardware design without spending a ton of money. This has also made it cheaper to buy high end test equipment, you don't need to buy a $3k Keysight oscope when a cheap Chinese USB oscope works just as well with plenty of features built-in for free. Obviously a proper academic or corporate research lab is going to be a lot different than a well-equiped hobbyist lab but the difference is not as stark as you'd imagine.

10. throwup238 ◴[04 Sep 25 15:04 UTC] No.45128115[source]▶
> Fabs are specific to the manufacturing of integrated circuits.

In EE the factories that produce PCBs are also called fabs.

11. rramadass ◴[05 Sep 25 04:25 UTC] No.45134974{4}[source]▶
Can you recommend some good resources (books/videos/etc.) for studying RF Engineering and doing RF Research by oneself?

Assume beginner knowledge of relevant mathematics/electronics and good software skills.

Am interested in both the practical side (eg. build a SDR from components) and the theoretical side i.e. the Physics/Mathematics to explain it.