Behzad Razavi Electronics 2 May 2026

The hiss vanished. The output was a clean, beautiful sine wave.

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. behzad razavi electronics 2

Then she saw it: a small paragraph, almost hidden. Razavi was explaining how parasitic capacitance at a certain node doesn’t just add delay—it moves the pole into the right-half plane. Instability. Hiss. Exactly her problem. The hiss vanished