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. Her roommate looked over. “Fixed?”
Here’s a short, engaging story about the legendary impact of Behzad Razavi’s Electronics 2 course and textbook.
“Never,” Sara muttered. Then she remembered the book. Not the official course textbook—the other one. The one seniors whispered about in labs. The one with the dark cover and the name that commanded respect: Behzad Razavi . behzad razavi electronics 2
The hiss vanished. The output was a clean, beautiful sine wave.
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.
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. From that night on, she didn’t just pass Electronics 2
“Give up?” asked her roommate, peeking over.
“Fixed,” Sara grinned. “Behzad Razavi just talked me through it.”
She grabbed a pencil. Following Razavi’s style—clean, logical, almost elegant—she added a tiny capacitor in a new location. Not the one her professor’s slides suggested. The one the book’s intuition whispered. Not for the equations—she knew those by heart
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.
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.
She ran the simulation.