What is Reddit's opinion of The Design of CMOS Radio-Frequency Integrated Circuits, Second Edition?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

I believe it was mentioned above that Electrolytic capacitors are not very reliable and I would definitely agree with that statement. They are very leaky and unreliable, but they can handle some variation in voltage and still operate. I am not going to say that I would like to use them, but they are cheap and can withstand a beating inside a power supply.

This isn't going to sound like much of an answer, but in all reality you are mostly told what type of budget you have to build an amplifier in industry and usually the quality of parts that you select for a design is dictated by either the cost of the part or trying to find the smallest part possible to save space on a PCB... This is why, in my experience, film capacitors are most common when implementing non-monolithic amplifiers (using OpAmp ICs on a PCB for example). When dealing with power supplies, sometimes Electrolytic capacitors are used because they can handle a much higher voltage swing than the other 'higher quality' capacitors. I used the quotes in the previous sentence because this a very subjective statement. It really depends on what you are looking the part to achieve in the circuit.

Your link is not incorrect, however I just wanted to point out what I have experienced.

With regards to your small signal question:

Correct me if I am wrong, but I will attempt to rephrase and (somewhat) answer your question: I believe you are asking more about the limitations of amplifiers and how small of a signal you can amplify.

This answer is very tricky to explain as there so many things that come into play when designing an amplifier. The design is very much centered on what the application is for, what the amplifier can be made out of, and how much power it can consume.

If you are looking to sense a small signal, the noise contributions are much lower on a BJT than a MOSFET (for reasons that I can go over if you like, but for brevity in an already lengthy response I will leave that topic for another time...).

To directly answer the 'small signal' question: This depends on the noise floor of the amplifier. You won't be able to detect anything lower than the noise floor of your amplifier. I believe Razavi gives quite a good summary of it on this link, but keep in mind that this is a graduate level topic. There is a lot of talk about the frequency domain in the link.

The subject of noise is covered in much greater detail when studying RF applications.

I am currently doing research on low noise CMOS amplifiers and am still learning quite a bit on the subject. I can type up a short summary of what I have learned, but my response is already long winded as it is... So let me know if you would like to hear about it.

I hope I didn't put anyone to sleep with my response, so here is the TL;DR...

TL;DR: Coupling capacitors ideally would have low leakage (normally see film capacitors in circuits today from my experience);

Bypass capacitor quality matters less imo because it is there to just take out the high frequency signal out of the critical signal path. I will probably catch some flack for this, but I would definitely use a Electrolytic cap if I had to for a bypass. Low pass filters can still be used to take out some of the signal noise once the signal gets to the amplifier

Noise is a very hot topic in CMOS amplifier design and is mostly a graduate level topic and discussed at length in most RF textbooks. I enjoy the book from Thomas H. Lee as well as the Razavi. The analog books that I like are Gray and Meyer and Razavi

Note: The 2 razavi links are different...

I have "Design of CMOS Radio-Frequency Integrated Circuits" by Thomas Lee. Not sure if it's what you're looking for, but it's a pretty good read as far as concepts go.

Amazon link