Welcome to Sound Analog, my website for documenting personal projects, articles, blog posts, and anything else involving analog circuit design. Although I have a passion for audio electronics, and have been building speakers since I was in high school, here I use the word “sound” as an adjective, not a noun. I hope you find the projects here represent good (sound) design practices and are presented in a logical and intuitive manner that makes my thought process easy to understand. There is no reason why analog circuit design needs to be tribal knowledge held only by a few gray beard engineers!

A little about myself: I’ve worked for over a decade developing high-precision, low-noise, and low-distortion integrated circuits, primarily amplifiers. Many of the products I’ve personally developed have achieved a level of popularity in the audio world, such as the OPA1622, OPA1688, OPA1692, INA1620, INA1650, and OPA1656 to name a few. I was also the driving force behind numerous other developments in this field, such as the JFE150 and JFE2140. During my career I’ve held the roles of applications engineer, systems engineer, systems manager, product line manager, and even worked as the Vice President leading the entire Linear Amplifiers business at Texas Instruments from 2020 to 2022.

In early 2022, after leading a very large business and the entire Tucson site through the pandemic and a very challenging semiconductor shortage, I decided to take some time off to get back to what I love: hands-on electrical engineering. This website is a result of my time off and I plan to keep growing it in the future with lots of interesting content. So stay tuned!

— John Caldwell