Current Sources and Voltage References: A Design Reference for Electronics Engineers 1st Edition

So far, a fantastic book. I've read several electronics books and hadn't found anything close to the awesome power of the Art of Electronics until I got this and started reading through it and using it. I think having both AoE and this book are a must for someone interested in designing proper circuits, wanting to understand fundamentals, and wanting a good reference resource.

This book does a nice job of covering the history of using transistors as related to current sources and voltage references (and the connection between these two -- a current mirror as part of a bandgap reference.) The book is nicely laid out and provides abundant tables and examples and discussions, throughout the text. A lot of time was spent to present the material in smaller, incremental steps. And I appreciated that, very much. So far as I know, this is the only book that covers this material in one place and I think it does so very well, besides. I'm very glad I bought the book.My intent, so far as it went, was to gain a lot of very detailed material on the possibility of going back to the "bad old days" where current mirrors were designed out of discrete parts and you had to cope with either designing for beta and VBE variations of BJTs or else had to spend time matching them, as well as dealing with thermal issues especially when the discrete parts couldn't be bound so thermally tightly as they can be on an IC substrate. There are matched current source/sink ICs available that carry pairs of BJTs on them for just that purpose. And I use them. But I also wanted to go back and learn from experiences when those parts weren't available. Part of the reason is that hobbyists have access to some very common BJTs, but generally do NOT have access to matched BJT IC parts. And often, those parts are SMT and not through-hole, anyway. So I wanted to grapple with, and learn about the boundaries of behavior, when forced to do this entirely with discrete parts. To that end, there is some discussion in the book that can be used -- because the book tries to cover some of the history and does, inadvertently as a result, discuss compensation and a couple of rules of thumb for that. But it's really not a book targeting my purposes squarely. That said, it's the closest I've found and it did help me a little bit. So it gave me a leg up on this, leaving me with some more work to do in discovery on my own.Overall, I liked the pacing (relatively smooth, incremental, and not overwhelming) and the more qualitative approach, which provided a very good and comprehensive overview of different techniques. In fact, that comprehensiveness is probably the strong point of the book. The book also does not bury the reader in tightly crafted and complex equations, without comment. The book does use equations, here and there, but it generally also comments about them enough too in the text. So there is plenty of context. It's not targeted at an IC designer trying to design a new chip. The equation and process model details for that are completely lacking here. It's really meant to be a comprehensive and thorough book covering as many approaches to current sources, mirrors, and voltage references as possible, so that the reader is aware of them and their qualities.As part of that comprehensiveness, there were tidbits for me, too. And that shows just how comprehensive this book actually is. It covered something that has been relegated to the dust bins of history and I'm fairly sure that no trained EE today wastes any time at all, nor has any reason to care about, doing what I want to try doing. Too many much, much better and much, much cheaper options are available for these functions today. There is zero reason for any modern design to care. Except for hobbyists who may have no other reasonable option.If you want a comprehensive walk-through that touches upon all the key points in history as well as the qualities of each of the different toplogies using BJTs, JFETs, and MOSFETs related to current mirrors, current sources/sinks, and voltage references, then I think this is your book.

The book has many real world examples combining state of the art current references and mosfets.

This book combines interesting history of the people and development that resulted in devices we take for granted today. You may find other or better ways to achieve your design after looking at what you know and seeing where the development went. It contains detailed information on the principles involved making the applications easy to remember.

Um einen guten Überblick zu bekommen, was es so an fertigen Komponenten gibt, auf was man achten sollte und auch garniert mit einigen historischen Abrissen ist es ein durchaus brauchbares und interessantes Werk, bei dem man allerdings an einigen Stellen wünscht, dass es mehr in die Tiefe ginge - gerade wenn es wirklich genau sein soll ist es ja nicht mit der Auswahl einer geeigneten Referenz alleine getan, aber das berührt das Buch nur am Rande.

Excellent

+ viele Varianten und Beispiele+ zeigt Details die man sonst in den "Standardwerken" wie z.B. Tietze/Schenk oder Horowitz/Hill so nicht findet+ Zahlenbeispiele+ gesammelte Applikationshinweise verschiedener Hersteller+ interessante Ausführungen zum Werdegang und zur Geschichte der - amerikanischen - Halbleiterindustrie- Taschenbuchausführung zu diesem Preis etwas zu teuer- bei mehr als 550 Seiten sollte Bindung sein sonst zerfleddert das bald- Stand 2005

Wow covers everything

600 Seiten zu Stromquellen und Spannungsreferenzen...Doch leider werden diese lieblos mit Fakten gefüllt, wie man sie auch in den entsprechenden Datenblättern findet. Praktisch keine Informationen zur Fertigung und Charakterisierung der entsprechenden Bauteile. Formeln bleiben ohne Herleitung.Schaltungsideen werden weder detailliert erläutert noch wird auf die Fallstricke verwiesen. So bleibt das Buch sehr oberflächlich und kann bestenfalls als Einstieg dienen.Schlussendlich kann ich nur empfehlen, das Buch pfleglich zu behandeln, so dass man es nach einem kurzen Reinschnuppern wieder zurückschicken kann.