Sara laughed out loud. Her roommate looked over. “Fixed?”
And when a young intern once asked her, “What’s the best way to learn analog design?” Sara smiled and handed her the dark-covered book.
“Fixed,” Sara grinned. “Behzad Razavi just talked me through it.”
She pulled out “Design of Analog CMOS Integrated Circuits” —affectionately called “Razavi” by all who dared. Chapter 11, Electronics 2 material: Feedback . She’d read it before, but now, desperate, she read it again. Slowly. behzad razavi electronics 2
But the magic wasn’t the equation. It was the next sentence : “To see this intuitively, consider what happens if we inject a small current pulse here…” And suddenly, Sara saw it. The circuit wasn’t a mess of components. It was a story. Charges moving, currents fighting, a delicate dance between speed and stability.
“Start here,” she said. “And listen to Behzad.”
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. Sara laughed out loud
She ran the simulation.
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.
The hiss vanished. The output was a clean, beautiful sine wave. “Fixed,” Sara grinned
“Give up?” asked her roommate, peeking over.
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.