PHYS 404 :: Physics Illinois :: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Course Description

Objectives

The objective of PHYS 404 is to give you the confidence with electronic circuits and instrumentation.  Roughly the first half of the course will focus on analog electronics.  We'll discuss steady-state circuit analysis using complex numbers and simple time-domain analysis.  We'll then discuss some basic semiconductor physics, pn junctions and transistors.   After that we'll look at amplifiers, feedback, control circuits, filters and oscillators. Discussions on analog electronics take about 11 weeks. I will briefly introduce the SPICE simulator--a useful tool for circuit designs. In week 12, the focus will then move to digital electronics: field effect transistors, logic gates and microcontrollers. In week 15 and 16, we'll then return to more sophisticated circuits and deal with signals and noise, modulation techniques and some aspects of high frequency electronics.  I will wrap up the semester with KiCAD and EasyCAD -- PCB layout tools for you to turn your circuit into professionally fabricated boards. 

Lecture notes will be posted for each class. There is no required textbook, but if you wish to buy one, I'd recommend the following texts:

Physics 404 is a 5 credit hour course, so it takes quite some time commitment.  Each week, there are 4 hours of lecture/demo and 6 hours of on-time, mandatory lab attendance, followed by a lab report.  

Lectures

Two 2-hour lectures per week, Mondays & Wednesdays from 1:00 p.m. to 2:50 p.m, Room 136 Loomis Lab.

Laboratory

Two 3-hour sessions per week in 6106 Engineering Science Building (ESB).  There are two sections:

There are six units of the lab work. Most units take multiple weeks to complete. Description of each unit of the lab will be posted on the course website, linked through the schedule.  Lab reports will be required.

The lab activities are now based around the Analog-Discovery 2,  which is a sophisticated electronic test station that fits in your pocket, communicates with your computer through a USB port and contains an oscilloscope, 2 signal generators, power supplies, logic and spectrum analyzers and digital input/output.  Each student will sign out one of these devices along with some other components.  This arrangement will allow you to continue working on the circuits at home if you wish to.   We will also use Arduino microcontrollers for some of the digital circuits so you'll need to do some simple programming with C when the time comes.   However, this is not a course on using software to analyze or to design circuits.   We should be far more concerned with developing an intuitive feel and qualitative understanding of electronics.  

For circuit analysis, we will need to refresh some of your math. I will suggest you to read these references as we progress through the various topics during lectures:

 

Learning Assessment

Homework

Some assignments will be conventional problem sets and others will require circuit construction and analysis.

Final Exam

There will be a 3-hour final.