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In a 2007 interview, Linear Technology co-founder and CTO Bob Dobkin argued that engineers should judge power supplies by the watts they waste—not efficiency percentages alone. He also explained why good IC design, like writing poetry, depends on making accumulated knowledge part of the designer’s craft.
Why did Bob Dobkin say IC design is like writing poetry?
Dobkin’s metaphor was about craft, not decoration. He compared designing integrated circuits to learning a foreign language: a designer must absorb the underlying knowledge until it becomes part of how they think. Only then can they assemble a circuit successfully. As he put it in his interview with Paul O’Shea for EE Times, “And designing for ICs is like writing poetry.”
The comparison reflects the tight constraints of analog design. A circuit is not simply a collection of individually correct parts; its elements must work together in a way that meets the system’s practical requirements. Dobkin’s point was that successful design relies on deeply internalized understanding, not just a recipe.
Why did Dobkin prefer power loss to efficiency?
Efficiency is a ratio, and the output voltage changes the context behind that percentage. Power loss—the difference between input and output power—more directly shows how much energy becomes heat and how much power a battery-powered system must supply. Dobkin summarized his view this way: “Efficiency is a good number but power loss is a more important number.”
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His example makes the distinction concrete: a supply delivering 1 V at 10 A with 80% efficiency dissipates 2 W. A supply delivering 2 V at 10 A with 90% efficiency also dissipates 2 W. The percentages differ, but the waste is the same. He also warned that a regulator specified at 3.3 V could appear five percentage points more efficient than one specified at 1.2 V even when their power dissipation is comparable. Those figures are examples from the 2007 interview, not measurements of current products.
For battery systems, lower power loss can mean longer runtime. It also matters for standby loads, such as memory that must remain powered while the rest of a device is off. Dobkin identified three contributors to switching-regulator losses:
- Quiescent current: power consumed by the regulator while operating, including when the useful load is small.
- Switching losses: energy lost as the regulator’s switching elements change state.
- I²R losses: resistive losses in current-carrying paths, which rise with the square of current.
What mattered most when designing a power supply?
Dobkin put power loss and manufacturability first. A circuit must avoid wasting power, but it also has to be practical to build consistently. Monitoring and telemetry through PMBus could be useful when a system was large enough to justify them; they were not automatic requirements for every design.
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Outbyte Driver Updater FREEScan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minuteDriver Scan →Outbyte PC Repair FREEClear out junk files and repair common Windows errorsFree Scan →He discussed modules that place power FETs and controllers within millimeters of one another to reduce parasitic effects. That close placement does not eliminate every limitation: inductors and lead inductance still constrain the design. He also addressed small, efficient modules, low-voltage regulators, LDOs, and the thermal limits of board-mounted designs. The engineering choice was not simply “integrate everything” or “put everything in a module”; complex magnetics and thermal considerations could make a module the more sensible architecture.
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Was digital power automatically better?
No. Dobkin saw telemetry as the most valuable part of digital power, because it lets a system report operating information. But digital control had to earn its added cost. It also had to work reliably: a control approach that caused instability or oscillation would not be an improvement merely because it was digital.
His position was conditional: support telemetry where it helps the system, and evaluate digital implementation against its cost and performance. That distinction matters because monitoring and control are different benefits; the usefulness of the first does not establish that the second is worth adopting in every regulator.
What was Linear Technology’s strategy in 2007?
In the interview, Dobkin described Linear Technology as focused on high-performance analog products rather than low-performance commodity markets. He said the company studied customers’ systems and looked for ways to improve even relatively low-cost products enough to create value customers would pay for. He expected competitors to copy successful solutions after a few years, so differentiation depended on continuing to solve demanding problems.
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A free scan shows the junk files, broken settings and background clutter dragging Windows down - then fixes them in one click.Free scan · Windows 10 & 11He also described a pragmatic approach to product architecture: use modules or selective integration when they make engineering sense. In the interview’s historical market estimates, Dobkin put the overall IC market at approximately $100–200 billion, the segment Linear addressed at approximately $30 billion, and Linear’s portion at approximately $1 billion. These are his estimates from 2007, not current market figures.
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Who was Bob Dobkin?
Robert Dobkin was born in Philadelphia on October 6, 1943, and attended MIT. He worked at National Semiconductor from 1970 to 1981 as director of advanced circuit development, then joined Linear Technology in 1981 as a founder and chief technical officer responsible for new-product development. The 2007 EE Times biographical panel credited him with more than 90 patents for linear ICs and more than 50 authored articles and technical papers. It also listed his membership in the Electronic Design Hall of Fame and a 1994 EDN Innovator of the Year award.
These roles and company descriptions belong to the interview’s 2007 context; they should not be read as a current profile. The interview was conducted by Paul O’Shea at the 2007 Applied Power Electronics Conference at the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim and published by EE Times on May 5, 2007.
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