This text is intended to be a populist book.
With so many complex equation–filled engineering books lining the
shelves of our bookstores, perhaps you are wondering whether the science
of microwaves and RF is ready for a text that can be understood by those
who do not speak Latin or wear black robes. We believe so. The goal of a
populist book is to appeal as much to the academic at a highbrow university
as to the practitioner working in today’s frantic production environment.
We hope you will find this text as relevant to your work of teaching others
as to improving your own skills.
This book is written for practicing engineers and for those who would
like to become one. And these days, who can afford not to keep learning?
Whether you are a student at your final year of college, an engineer in
industry who has just been assigned your first RF design project, or a seasoned
veteran of the magic of microwave design, we hope that you will all
find something useful in these pages. Even if you are a microwave or RF
industry guru with most of the answers already, our experience in writing
this has been that there is still a thing or two out there that needs explaining.
If you cannot find anything that seems inexplicable, then at least you
will have the satisfaction of reassuring yourself that you have indeed been
right all these (long!) years.
We do not suggest you throw away your other excellent text books
that explain semiconductor transport equations, Green’s functions, or the
complex mathematics of filter design; just that this effort might make those
paperweights all the more relevant. Do not misunderstand us—we do not
imply that anyone can become a high-grade RF circuit and system
designer without using any complex algebra. We feel strongly, however,
that you do not need as much of it as some of the courses you have taken
before may have included.
This book and Volume I are the culmination of more than 40 joint
years of teaching these topics to thousands of practicing electrical engineers from
around the world. Little by little, we have extended the scope of our
courses and learned the simplest ways to convey basic ideas to our audience.
We have often been surprised and have found for the most part that
our audience is generally not interested in obtaining guru status or academic
knowledge, but interested rather in gaining an understanding of microwave and RF circuits, in gaining intuitive insight, and in applying
that to their work. We hope we have captured that spirit herein.
This book is not written for the expert. If anything, we have omitted
specialist material (it is long enough as it is!). We often begin our courses by
telling our students that if they have spent the past year characterizing the
intermodulation properties of a device to design a predistorter circuit, they
are probably already one of just a handful of experts in the world in that
area—and they can probably teach us something. Although we hope this
book will convey the background and insight to set you on the road to
becoming an expert, it will not take you down the narrow and winding
lanes that make you one. We have focused on discrete circuits and discrete
circuit design rather than IC design, believing that only when discrete
design is mastered can those techniques be applied to integrated circuits. In
consciously stopping short of IC design, we have not considered many
worthy topics, such as RC or AGC oscillators or complex biasing techniques.
Nor have we considered integrated systems such as phase-locked
loops. All these topics are worthily covered elsewhere in expert texts of
their own, and rightly so. Perhaps a third volume of this series will one day
attempt to simplify those topics as well, should our wives ever let us back
near our computers again!