Welcome to our annual Best Electronic Design issue, where our staff and contributing editors choose the best OEM products, technologies, and standards of the past year in a variety of categories. But what fascinated our readers in 2010? Let’s take a look back at our top 10 articles, based on Web traffic at electronicdesign.com.
• “Build A Smart Battery Charger Using A Single-Transistor Circuit” by Ejaz ur Rehman: I’m always amazed when I see this 2002 item on my daily traffic reports. It must be the article that’s most used to develop school projects throughout the world, since you can tell from the comments that lots of novices are drawn to it. Readers most want to know actual circuit values, which the author did not list. By the way, we have an Idea for Design in the queue that tries to improve on this circuit. We’ll see how it fares next year.
• “2010 Salary Survey: How Much Bounce In The Rebound?” by Jay McSherry: This October article was a blockbuster for us. It slices and dices engineering salaries in a way that makes for a potent read. Need to know how you fare against others with your job title? It’s there. Need to know how much engineers are making in your neck of the woods? It’s there. This year, we also added more punch to our regional data with a map of the U.S sectioned off into different regions. Click on an area and you’ll get a bunch of interesting stats. How cool is that?
• “What’s All This Transimpedance Amplifier Stuff, Anyhow? (Part 1)” by Bob Pease: This is one of two columns that our resident analog guru, Bob Pease, landed in the top 10. (No, Part 2 is not the other one.) If you read Pease Porridge, you know Bob doesn’t always stick to circuit design. In this column, which was originally printed in January 2001, he did. And it has developed a life of its own among readers who visit our site.
• “Google’s Android Versus Apple’s iOS: And The Winner Is?” by Bill Wong: This article is another that recently appeared on our Web site and as our November 4 cover story. But it goes to the heart of what is important to engineers creating embedded and consumer products. These operating systems appear to have a rosy future, especially when teamed with an ARM-based architecture, for smart phones, tablet computing, and lots of other applications. It’s no wonder so many readers want to know more about them.
• “All-Electric Vehicles Prepare To Shock The Automotive Market” by Bill Wong: Bill was an early adopter of the Prius Hybrid, so you can bet that he will be first on line for an all-electric car. He not only wrote a great comparison article, he also added some history about electric vehicles. I certainly did not know that Jay Leno owns a Baker Electric that is still operational.
• “Inside The Apple iPad” by Bill Wong: With this article, Bill Wong lands his third story in our top 10. We wanted to get this article on the Web as soon as the iPad launched. Unfortunately, Bill did not have an iPad on hand to pry apart with a screwdriver. But he did the next best thing. He tracked down a terrific report from ifixit and Chipworks and provided his analysis of their teardown. Obviously, the iPad is of great interest to our readers, both as a productivity tool and an example of advanced engineering on the part of Apple.
• “What’s All This Carrot Juice Stuff, Anyhow?” by Bob Pease: Again, Bob Pease doesn’t always stick to circuit design. He likes to tell everyone who will listen that his columns are about THINKING. Bob has a wealth of stories, but none are more interesting than the ones he relates about World War II. This one of tells the tale of British RF “boffins” outwitting the Luftwaffe.
• “Maximum-Power-Point-Tracking Solar Battery Charger” by W. Stephen Woodward: Alternative energy topics are very popular with readers. This Idea for Design is no exception. Plus, it has a couple of other things going for it. First, it describes circuitry for implementing the popular maximum-power-point-tracking algorithm. Second, it’s written by one of our most respected IFD authors, W. Stephen Woodward.
• “Andy Grove Has A Few Thousand Words About American Jobs” by Ron Schneiderman: With the economy just recovering and unemployment numbers in the 10% range, readers responded to this timely July article based on an item Grove wrote for Bloomberg Businessweek. However, some readers felt we didn’t take Grove to task for participating in the practices he railed about in his article.
• “New Twist On Kirchoff’s Current Law Simplifies Circuit Analysis” by Anshi Chen: Finally, what can you say about this article? Obviously, our readers are passionate about electronics and are still interested in exploring the fundamentals of circuit analysis.