Once upon a time, you studied the electric circuit theory where you learned many techniques to analyze electric circuits. Two famous and analogous techniques are the nodal voltage analysis, and the mesh analysis. In the nodal voltage analysis, you started by picking a node that becomes the reference node. This node is assumed to have an absolute zero potential, which we often call the “ground” node.
You won’t find this assumption harmful so long as you don’t care about the voltage relationship between the circuit and other objects. The node that is common between many sub-circuits is usually a very good selection to mathematically simplify the circuit analysis.
When we study the specialized courses of electronic circuits, we usually forget about many circuit analysis techniques such as superposition, the Thevenin Equivalent, the Norton Equivalent, and mesh analysis. We focus mainly on one technique, the nodal voltage analysis (Figure 1).
Figure 1 Nodal voltage analysis usually eases analysis of electronic circuits. An example for the nodal voltage analysis is shown on the left, against the mesh analysis for the same circuit on the right.
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RF Engineer 