How I Design

Over the years, I have sold more than 100 copyrights of designs -- the latest last month. It generally goes like this:

• First, an intuition. With my present project, that intuition is: "There's a new way of doing radio demodulation."
• Then I build it, one careful step at a time. That way, I am capable of knowing exactly what isn't working if it doesn't work.
• I trust my intuition, even if I have tried it and it hasn't worked. I drop it only if I know that it definitely won't work.
• Once a design works, even if it works badly, I have something to go on. Then I seek to perfect it, bit by bit.
• Yet even if an intuition fails, there may be aspects of it that work. One needs to be open to those, too.