In a cramped dorm room lit by the cold blue glow of a simulation screen, third-year electrical engineering student Sara groaned. On her desk lay a beast she had been wrestling for three days: a multi-stage CMOS amplifier. It oscillated, distorted, and hissed like an angry cat. Her professor’s slides offered only tidy equations and cheerful assumptions. Reality was not tidy.
Here’s a short, engaging story about the legendary impact of Behzad Razavi’s Electronics 2 course and textbook.
She ran the simulation.
The hiss vanished. The output was a clean, beautiful sine wave.
From that night on, she didn’t just pass Electronics 2. She fell in love with it. Years later, as a chip designer, she kept that worn copy of Razavi on her desk. Not for the equations—she knew those by heart. But for the voice: patient, precise, and utterly convinced that anyone, with the right guide, could learn to hear a circuit’s hidden song.
Then she saw it: a small paragraph, almost hidden. Razavi was explaining how parasitic capacitance at a certain node doesn’t just add delay—it moves the pole into the right-half plane. Instability. Hiss. Exactly her problem.
Sara laughed out loud. Her roommate looked over. “Fixed?”
“Fixed,” Sara grinned. “Behzad Razavi just talked me through it.”
In a cramped dorm room lit by the cold blue glow of a simulation screen, third-year electrical engineering student Sara groaned. On her desk lay a beast she had been wrestling for three days: a multi-stage CMOS amplifier. It oscillated, distorted, and hissed like an angry cat. Her professor’s slides offered only tidy equations and cheerful assumptions. Reality was not tidy.
Here’s a short, engaging story about the legendary impact of Behzad Razavi’s Electronics 2 course and textbook.
She ran the simulation.
The hiss vanished. The output was a clean, beautiful sine wave.
From that night on, she didn’t just pass Electronics 2. She fell in love with it. Years later, as a chip designer, she kept that worn copy of Razavi on her desk. Not for the equations—she knew those by heart. But for the voice: patient, precise, and utterly convinced that anyone, with the right guide, could learn to hear a circuit’s hidden song.
Then she saw it: a small paragraph, almost hidden. Razavi was explaining how parasitic capacitance at a certain node doesn’t just add delay—it moves the pole into the right-half plane. Instability. Hiss. Exactly her problem.
Sara laughed out loud. Her roommate looked over. “Fixed?”
“Fixed,” Sara grinned. “Behzad Razavi just talked me through it.”