About the Authors

David A. Brown is President of Berkeley Nucleonics Corporation and the lead author of the Nuts and Bolts series. He has spent his career around the instruments this book describes, and he writes about them the way he talks about them: plainly, with an engineer's respect for the physics and a builder's impatience for anything that does not earn its place on the bench.

The series exists because the same questions keep coming up. What does this specification really mean? Which number matters for my signal? Why does the output look right on paper and wrong on the scope? Rather than answer them one call at a time, the Nuts and Bolts books gather the explanations in one place, written for the practicing engineer who wants to understand the instrument, not just operate it. This volume on arbitrary waveform generation follows that pattern. It favors clear reasoning over marketing, and it points readers back to the datasheet whenever a precise number is at stake.

Berkeley Nucleonics has been in the signal business since 1963. The company began in San Rafael, California, building fast-risetime pulse generators for nuclear research, and that early focus on clean, precise edges shaped everything that followed. The work has grown well beyond those first instruments. Today Berkeley Nucleonics designs and builds across signal generation, RF and microwave, pulsed power, and radiation detection, and the arbitrary waveform generator family is part of that broader catalog.

Behind the byline sits the larger Berkeley Nucleonics team: the applications engineers who answer the hard questions, the designers who turn requirements into hardware, and the support staff who keep instruments running in the field. This book carries one name on the cover, but it speaks for the whole company's habit of treating a signal as something worth getting exactly right.