COURSE TITLE: ECE 270 Applications of Electronic Devices

 

CATALOG DESCRIPTION: DC and AC networks, rectifiers, transistor amplifiers, feedback and operational amplifiers, digital electronics, and microprocessors.  Not open to electrical or computer engineering majors. 

 

REQUIRED TEXT:  M. A. Plonus, Electronics and Communications for Scientists and Engineers, Harcourt/Academic Press, 2001.

 

REFERENCE TEXTS: G. Rizzoni, Principles and Applications of Electrical Engineering, McGraw Hill, 3rd edition, 2000.

R. J. Smith, Electronics:  Circuits and Devices, Wiley, 3rd edition, 1987.

 

COURSE COORDINATOR:  Martin Plonus

                       

COURSE GOALS:  To provide the non-electrical engineering student with a foundation for understanding the basic principles of electrical and electronic systems.  This course should help provide a solid basis for further studies, whether in the classroom or on the job.  Because of the necessarily wide scope of the course topics and the time limitations of our 10-week quarter, the course is fast-paced.  Success requires the student to attend all lectures and labs and to keep up with the reading and homework assignments.

 

PREREQUISITES: Mathematics 214-2 and Physics 135-2 or equivalent.

 

GRADING: Homework 20%; labs 20%; midterm 30%; final 30%

 

DETAILED COURSE TOPICS

 

Week 1:  Ideal sources, sign convention, circuit elements: R, L, and C.  Ohm’s Law, practical sources, Kirchhoff’s current and voltage laws, voltage and current dividers.  Electrical networks.

Week 2:  Node and mesh analysis.  Thevenin and Norton equivalent circuits.  Maximum power transfer.  Transients and time constants in RC and RL circuits.  Complex numbers, sinusoids and phasors.

Week 3:  Impedance, AC circuit analyss.  RC and RL in Hi-pass and Low-pass filters.  Resonance and Band-pass.  Q-factor and bandwidth.  Power in AC circuits, complex power.  Average and RMS values.  Power transfer, power factor.  Transformers, impedance matching.  Diodes:  rectification and power supplies.

Week 4:  Practical diode circuits:  clipping and clamping circuits, Zener diode voltage regulation, SCR’s.  Conduction in semiconductor devices, the pn junction.  Rectifier equation.  PN junction and the transistor.  Basics of bipolar junction transistors (BJTs) and field effect transistors.

Week 5:  Characteristic curves for BJTs, FETs, and MOSFETs (metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistors).  The transistor as an amplifier:  design of load line, selecting of operating point by biasing (self-bias and fixed-bias circuits), and graphical methods for gain.

Week 6:  Equivalent circuit of transistor for small-signal amplification:  BJT/FET as current/voltage-controlled current amplifier.  Bandpass of amplifier:  midband gain and deterioration of gain at low land high frequencies.  Power amplifiers (class A and push-pull).  Analysis of a system:  the superheterodyne AM receiver.

Week 7:  Introduction to operational amplifiers (OP-AMPS).  Inverting and non-inverting amplifiers, unit gain buffers, comparators, integrating and differentiating OP-Amps.

Week 8:  A/D converters, differential and instrumentation amplifiers.  Combinatorial logic circuits:  gates, Boolean algebra, adders, encoders/decoders.

Week 9:  Sequential logic circuits:  flip-flops, shift registers, counters.  Memory:  RAM cells, RAM and ROM.

Week 10:  Hex numbers and memory addressing.  CPU and microprocessors.

 

LABORATORY PROJECTS

Week 1:  No lab

Week 2:  Introduction to the laboratory instruments:  Function Generator and Oscilloscope.

Week 3:  D.C. electrical measurements, Ohm’s Law, voltage and current dividers.

Week 4:  Time and frequency domains – circuit reponses: Time-domain (transient) response of RC and RL circuits, frequency-domain (sinusoidal) circuit response of circuits comprised of these elements.

Week 5:  X-Y display techniques:  semiconductor diode characteristics and circuits.

Week 6: Transistors and Amplifier Design: Bipolar junction transistors (BJTs), biasing and use in amplifiers.

Week 7: Field effect transistors (FETs), biasing and use in amplifiers.

Week 8: Operational Amplifiers: Inverting, Non-inverting, Summing Amplifier; Integrator, Sine and Square Wave Oscillator

Week 9: Digital Circuits – Part I and II

Week 10: Microprocessors.

 

COURSE OBJECTIVES: When a student completes this course, s/he should be able to:

  1. Analyze resistive circuits having independent and dependent sources using both node and mesh techniques.
  2. Develop Thevenin’s and Norton’s equivalent circuits for resistive circuits containing independent and/or dependent sources.
  3. Analyze the first-order transient behavior of resistor-inductor (RL) and resistor- capacitor (RC) circuits having initial conditions on inductor current or capacitor voltage.
  4. Analyze the sinusoidal steady-state behavior of RLC circuits using phasors, impedance concepts, node and mesh analysis, and Thevenin’s and Norton’s equivalent circuits.
  5. Estimate the frequency response of simple filters using Bode plots.
  6. Calculate real and reactive power and power factor in ac circuits. Design simple power-factor correction for inductive loads.
  7. Analyze and design simple ac circuits with transformers to achieve conjugate impedance matching.
  8. Analyze and design simple circuits such as rectifiers and clippers involving diodes (including Zener diodes) using diode equivalent circuits and the load-line technique.
  9. Analyze and design simple circuits involving BJTs for the operating point, small-signal low-frequency gain, and large-signal switching behavior using BJT equivalent circuits and the load-line technique.
  10. Analyze and design simple circuits involving MOSFETs for the operating point, small-signal low-frequency gain, and large-signal switching behavior using MOSFET equivalent circuits and the load-line technique.
  11. Analyze and design simple circuits involving operational amplifiers used to implement amplification, signal summation, differentiation, integration, and frequency filtering. Use of feedback to obtain more stable gain. Design using OP-AMPs simple sinusoidal and square-wave oscillators.
  12. Why digital? Digital signals in an analog world. Digital signal representation. Combinatorial and sequential logic circuits.
  13. Take a problem statement, construct a truth table, write a logic expression for it, simplify logic expressions using Boolean algebra and build a minimum-gate logic circuit. Understand logic gates and build logic circuits such as counters, shift registers.
  14. Take a problem statement, construct a truth table, write a logic expression for it, simplify logic expressions using Boolean algebra and build a minimum-gate logic circuit. Understand logic gates and build logic circuits such as counters, shift registers.

 

ABET CONTENT CATEGORY:  100% Engineering (Design component).