Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

In Chapter 5 in "The Art of Electronics 3rd Edition", Horowitz offers an analysis on the 6.5 and 7.5 digits of accuracy attained from the Agilent DMM.

http://www.keysight.com/en/pd-1000001296%3Aepsg%3Apro-pn-344...

Chapter 5 is all about precision, Chapter 8 is all about noise.

In essence, you run a worst-case error analysis over your circuit. In many cases, 1% errors can be attenuated into smaller errors with good design. If you aren't careful however, then errors grow bigger instead.

---------

On a tangent, but somewhat related note for those software people...

The methodology is kinda similar to error analysis with Floating Point arithmetic btw. You think about where error happens, and whenever possible, try to "squash" the error instead of making it grow bigger.

All double-precision Floating Point math has an error of +/- 1 bit 53-bits over. The question is what do you do with that error, and how can you prevent it from moving up. If you do things like sort your numbers from smallest to largest (in magnitude) before adding them up, and prevent subtraction (or addition of a negative number) at all costs, you can actually make your errors smaller.

If you're not careful about the order of operations... errors grow exponentially (and even faster than that with subtraction!). On the other hand... if you are careful about things... errors shrink exponentially!



Consider applying for YC's Winter 2026 batch! Applications are open till Nov 10

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: