<p>Whcich of these two subjects in electrical engineering is considered hardest?</p>
<p>analog is way harder than digital</p>
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<p>quoted for truth. Like BJT, you gotta actually change the circuit into hybrid-pi model and MOSFET… short the input than controlled current source. You have to worry about signal being cutoff due to too high voltage source I mean analog is way worse than DC.</p>
<p>Is it true that analog design requires more math skills?</p>
<p>^^ Yes, it does.</p>
<p>Analog is definitely harder.</p>
<p>I am kind of a n00b, but can any of them even be compared to the things you do in physics in high school with electricity?</p>
<p>fakki:</p>
<p>Analog is more similar to the physics you do in high school, while digital is more like programming. </p>
<p>Introductory analog classes deal with electrons flowing through circuits and how their behaviors change as they go through special devices. Analog deals with voltages, current, amplifiers, and circuit elements like transistors, diodes, resistors, etc. The goal of early analog classes is to teach you how these devices work and how to connect them to achieve specific output voltages or currents from an input voltage or current.</p>
<p>Introductory digital classes almost completely disregard the physics behind electricity and focus on programming-like logic. Electric signals are reduced to 1’s or 0’s, and devices made up of dozens of transistors are represented as ideal, theoretical machines. Early digital classes teach you how to take these machines (AND gates, OR gates, registers, adders, etc.) and create useful devices with them (counters, simple computers, etc.).</p>
<p>It’s VERY true that introductory analog classes are harder than introductory digital classes. The main reason for that is that digital is so idealized early on and also focuses on BASIC, LOGICAL concepts. Early analog classes hit you immediately with difficult-to-visualize physics and a lot of math.</p>
<p>But I’d submit that BOTH are equally hard if you delve deeply enough. For instance, digital clocks these days are getting increasingly faster. High frequency electrical signals do NOT behave ideally. They can do some weird stuff, most of which I still have to learn. And making sure that your signals arrive where they should before each cycle is also critical at these high speeds.</p>
<p>Bottom line: digital IS easier at the beginning, but it can be quite difficult when working in the real world or taking higher-level courses.</p>
<p>y2k is correct. Electrical signals propagate at the speed of light. It takes approximately 1 nanosecond for a signal to travel one foot (using c = 3e8 m/s). Which sounds trivial, but not when your circuit involves clocks running in Ghz (i.e. digital circuits). All of a sudden, fundamental theorems on which low-frequency circuit analysis is based (e.g. Kirchoff’s Laws) fall apart.</p>
<p>The laws governing high frequency circuits need to be derived from physics. And as most physics grad students will tell you (or at least, they’ve told me), electromagnetics is the hardest specialization within graduate physics.</p>
<p>On the other hand, some students specializing in digital design focus on higher-level topics such as processor design and efficiency. This area is rarely concerned with the underlying physics of the transistors upon which their high-level devices are built, and is widely considered (fairly or not) “easier”.</p>