Getting cooking in the analog kitchen

The enthusiastic response from engineers to the March 1 launch of the Planet Analog Web site (www.planetanalog.com) suggests the analog design community has been feeling disenfranchised. No more. Now analog EEs, and marketers too, have a place to congregate online.

Some of my thinking in designing this site follows consultant Michael Vance's notion of "the corporate kitchen." In the typical family home, Vance reasoned, the kitchen is the place toward which-sooner or later-everyone gravitates. A place not just where meals are taken, but where contacts are made, experiences shared and information exchanged-one where ideas percolate right alongside the coffee. Vance believed every corporation should have the equivalent of the family kitchen.

As an online publication, Planet Analog aims to get things cookin' in analog. The site will have the kinds of sections you'd expect: news, technology, insight, features and product showcase material-the latter drawn from EE Times, Electronic Buyers' News and other publications under the CMP Media umbrella. Maybe it's just me, but as a guy sensitive to analog and mixed analog-digital interfaces, I see them everywhere. CMP publications are a rich source of analog information.

But the real value of Planet Analog is not just its focus on analog and mixed-signal products and applications, but its interactive features. Initially, this category includes job postings and a discussion board. But the next incarnation will also include an online scheduled chat room, in which a variety of analog gurus will lead discussions on topics of interest to the analog community.

With your support, this will be the Web-site equivalent of the "kitchen" for the analog and mixed-signal design community: a relaxed, comfortable place for design engineers to accumulate information, to post and share it with their peers, to get advisories and schedules.

Already, response to the site reflects an openness and conviviality. One message came from a 27-year-old engineer in Germany who said the site reinforced his motivation to "go on designing analog stuff" rather than "learn to program DSPs or PLDs."

And by the way, he asked where he could get more information on vacuum tube amplifiers.