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Where can I find electronic circuits classified by “difficulty level”?

AlissonOliveira17
Associate

Greetings,
I am a researcher currently developing a study on the measurement of difficulty/complexity in electronic circuits. I am looking for books, scientific articles, instructional materials, or datasets that present sets of electronic circuits accompanied by some indication of difficulty, complexity level, or pedagogical classification, even if such indication is subjective or approximate.
Any reference would be welcome, including classic textbooks, lecture notes, datasets, academic repositories, or materials used in technical or university-level education. If you are aware of works that organize circuits by difficulty level, or that could be used as a basis for comparative analysis, I would greatly appreciate your help and recommendations.
On my ResearchGate profile, I have published some works on complexity measurement in other domains, such as industrial property patents and C programming language source code, which may help contextualize my research approach.
Thank you in advance for any help or references you may be able to share.
LINK: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Alisson-Oliveira-17/

3 REPLIES 3
Peter BENSCH
ST Employee

Welcome @AlissonOliveira17, to the community!

My simplified two cents on your question: every developer assesses the complexity of an electronic circuit largely based on their own experience.

Here's an example: someone with no prior knowledge of electronics will consider controlling an LED to be very complex, a very experienced power supply developer will probably despair at a simple MCU project from a first-year computer science student, and a long-time MCU developer will have problems with S-parameters from RF networks, where an RF developer waves them away with a smile.

At least I am not aware of any publications on this subject, but perhaps someone here in the community has something to say about it.

Regards
/Peter

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Good morning. Thank you all for your comments and considerations.
In the software domain, there are approximately hundreds of code metrics, and reference [1] below presents an example of a survey organizing these metrics.
My goal is to find a dataset of electromechanical/electronic circuits in order to measure the complexity of these circuits using the Index of Internal Effort (IIE) framework, as illustrated in the following examples:
[2] application of the IIE to source codes from a programming Olympiad;
[3] application of the IIE to industrial property patents.
As my primary academic background is in industrial automation, any support or guidance from electronics specialists such as yourselves will be greatly appreciated.
1- https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1155/2020/8840389
2- https://sol.sbc.org.br/index.php/erigo/article/view/32208/32008
3- https://jppres.com/jppres/pdf/vol12/jppres23.1859_12.5.852.pdf


@AlissonOliveira17 wrote:

In the software domain, there are approximately hundreds of code metrics


Indeed.

So start by looking at how those metrics were first developed, and how they evolved?

How did people approach the question, "how can we quantify software 'complexity'?"

Why did they think that was an important question to answer?

Why did you think that it's an important question for electronic circuits?

 

An early software metric was just 'lines of code' - so an electronic equivalent could be 'number of components' ?

 

Clearly, 'lines of code' is a poor metric, as not all lines are the same.

Similarly, in electronics, not all components are the same; eg, 'active' may be considered more complex than 'passive'; an IC may be considered more complex than a transistor; a microcontroller may be considered more complex than a 555 timer.

 

But is a circuit using just one IC more (or less) "complex" than one doing the same thing with a dozen discrete components?

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked.
A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work.