It's kind of funny; I came out of school ready to design circuits with discrete transistors and they laughed at me. "Sure, that can work, but it will definitely work if you use this opamp." Much like we caution people not to write assembly, because the compiler can do it better.
But sometimes it can't. Sometimes the opamp designers made choices I would not prefer for my circuits. To me it's funny how after all this time, I've only recently started to consider transistor-level design again. I suspect it's a deeper understanding of the tradeoffs than I had as a novice engineer. Or hubris, thinking I can do it better.
There absolutely isn't a practical alternative for low volumes, there's barely even one for medium volumes. There once were IC houses with semicustom parts - they had a variety of transistors, resistors and maybe a few (really huge bipolar) gates onboard, and you could design the metal layer, resulting in a single custom mask on an otherwise standard product. Actually, Astec still has one, Device Engineering offer one, but there's not a lot out there. This was always a niche business anyway.
So yeah, it does seem obvious that we should design from discretes, actually crawl into the boxes in our block diagrams and build the things in there from scratch. But it's funny how easy it can be to stop doing that, to just find a single chip/module that does it all. And it's been amazing to me how well the IC market has mapped out to what I have needed over the past several years. Every time I've tried to build something, I found I could just buy it. Eventually, you think "buy" before "build." For me, it's taken extra effort to consider "build" first anymore.
Just like the author found, it's fun, too. Just buying that ublox GPS chip is okay, but building the parts I need is cool.
But sometimes it can't. Sometimes the opamp designers made choices I would not prefer for my circuits. To me it's funny how after all this time, I've only recently started to consider transistor-level design again. I suspect it's a deeper understanding of the tradeoffs than I had as a novice engineer. Or hubris, thinking I can do it better.
There absolutely isn't a practical alternative for low volumes, there's barely even one for medium volumes. There once were IC houses with semicustom parts - they had a variety of transistors, resistors and maybe a few (really huge bipolar) gates onboard, and you could design the metal layer, resulting in a single custom mask on an otherwise standard product. Actually, Astec still has one, Device Engineering offer one, but there's not a lot out there. This was always a niche business anyway.
So yeah, it does seem obvious that we should design from discretes, actually crawl into the boxes in our block diagrams and build the things in there from scratch. But it's funny how easy it can be to stop doing that, to just find a single chip/module that does it all. And it's been amazing to me how well the IC market has mapped out to what I have needed over the past several years. Every time I've tried to build something, I found I could just buy it. Eventually, you think "buy" before "build." For me, it's taken extra effort to consider "build" first anymore.
Just like the author found, it's fun, too. Just buying that ublox GPS chip is okay, but building the parts I need is cool.