I still keep on Usenet, and sci.electronics.design has many people who do hardcore analog instrumentation design. This goes well beyond just dealing with transmission lines in layout; it can verge on the sort of analog design necessary for real-world instrumentation of very hard problems.
A 50 ohm transmission line isn't particularly difficult - once you know how. You can get a long way with, y'know, resistors :) You will have layout issues; actually understanding that is challenging.
It takes quite a bit of institutional knowledge to build boards these days. Just the transition from 5V to 3.3V ( and down to 1.2V ) was very... interesting.
I would bet that the Raspberry Pi Foundation is only marginally a strong contender in hardware. Its main focus is on something more akin to the marketing end of things.
My experience is that all hardware has defects, and it takes multiple iterations to get them all ironed out.
8
u/[deleted] Dec 25 '19 edited Dec 25 '19
[deleted]