Physics 160 Practical Electronics Spring 2011 1 Syllabus - SCIPP

Physics 160 Practical Electronics Spring 2011
Syllabus
Lecture M,W 12:30–1:40 pm, ISB 231.
Lab Section:
M,W 2:00 pm–6:00 pm, Nat Sci II, Room 110.
o TA: Peyton Rose
o Email: prose@ucsc.edu
o Phone: 459-4588 Office: Nat Sci II, Room 308
Instructor: Robert Johnson
Office: 323 Natural Sciences II; Office phone 459-2125
E-mail: rjohnson@scipp.ucsc.edu
Office hours: Fridays, 1:00–4:00 pm, in the lab (Nat Sci II, Room 110). You may use this time to finish
your lab work, and you may also look for me in my office in Room 323 at other times.
The course web site is http://scipp.ucsc.edu/~johnson/phys160/phys160.htm, or you can go directly to
eCommons.
Textbooks (both required):
The Art of Electronics, 2 nd edition, by Horowitz and Hill.
Student Manual for the Art of Electronics, by Hayes and Horowitz
Week Dates Lecture Topics Reading Reading Lab HW
Textbook St. Man.
Due
1 April 2 DC circuits
1.01–1.06 N1, X1 1. DC Circuits
April 4 Linear AC circuits
1.07–1.17
2 April 9 Circuit analysis and
simulation
1.18–1.24 N2, X2 2. Capacitors
April 11 Diodes and diode circuits 1.25–1.34
#1
3 April 16 Diodes and transistors 2.10–2.09 N3, X3 3. Diodes
April 18 Basic transistor circuits
4 April 23 Amplifier building blocks 2.10–2.14 N4, X4 4. Transistors I
April 25 Transistor models
2.15–2.20
#2
5 April 30 More transistor circuits 2.21–2.25 N5, X5 5. Transistors II
May 2 Amplifier noise
7.11–7.14
6 May 7 Introduction to FETs 3.01–3.06 N6, X6 6. Transistors III
May 9 FET circuits
3.07–3.17
#3
7 May 14 Feedback and op-amps 4.01–4.10 N7, X7 7. FET I
May 16 Op amp limitations
4.11–4.13
8 May 21 More real op-amp circuits. 4.14–4.24 N8, X8 8. Op Amps I
May 25 Finite-gain effects
4.25–4.37
#4
9 May 28 Holiday
May 30 Oscillators
5.12,5.13,
5.18,5.19
N9, X9 9. Op Amps II
10 June 4 Voltage regulators
6.01–6.07 N10 10. Oscillators &
June 6 Power circuits
6.19, 6.20 N10, N12 12. Power Sup. #5
11 June 13 Final exam 4:00 to 7:00 pm
Labs:
We will not necessarily do every section of every lab that is listed. I will clarify this as we go
along. The last week includes two labs, both of which will be abbreviated:
Lab 10: Sections 1, 2, and 8.
Lab 12: Sections 1, 3, 4 and 5, but not including the “Three Terminal Regulator as Current
Source.”
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Physics 160 Practical Electronics Spring 2011
The lab work is done in pairs. It is important that both partners participate equally in the circuit
construction and measurements. If we notice pairs in which one person is dominating the work we may try
to shuffle the groups.
There will not be any formal instruction in the lab sections, so you can come and go at will during
your sections, as long as you coordinate with your partner. In addition, I will open the lab on Friday
afternoons from 1:00 to 4:00 pm, in case you need more time to finish up, or in case you have questions for
me. Your notebook with the completed lab report will be due during the lab session Monday of the
following week. For that reason, you will need two lab books to do your work in.
The lab schedule is problematic on Memorial Day week; we will have to work around that
somehow.
Lab Kits:
In addition to the textbooks, you will have to purchase a lab kit containing various electronics
parts needed in the lab experiments, for a nominal fee (which should show up on your overall UCSC billing
after you register). Prof. Kuttner in Nat. Sci. II, Room 176 handles the purchase of the kits, and I will
distribute them to you.
Lab Precautions:
Please keep in mind the following cautions, for your own safety, to avoid damage to equipment,
and to make your time more productive:
1. Never plug anything into the A/C power if it is not fully enclosed and insulated. There should never be
any exposed metal in your setup that could pose a shock danger.
2. Never open any chassis that uses A/C power while it is plugged in. In fact, do not open any of the
equipment chasses without consulting me, Fred Kuttner, or the TA.
3. Turn the VOM or DVM meter to the desired setting before connecting it to your circuit. You are
guaranteed to blow out the fuse of the ammeter if you connect it across a voltage source. This happens
very often and is a nuisance.
4. Do not make changes to your circuit while it is powered. I know that this is easy to forget, but do try
to take care with this to avoid damaging your components or blowing fuses.
5. Turn off all equipment when done, including the DVM and VOM. Put all of the equipment away
neatly before leaving. Do not expect your setup to remain intact on the workbench from one day to the
next.
6. When making measurements with an oscilloscope, the return side of the input must be connected to
ground. For example, you cannot measure the voltage across a resistor in your circuit unless one side
of the resistor is at ground potential. Do not try to play any tricks with the scope ground in order to get
around this limitation.
7. Do not connect any of your diodes directly across a voltage source. If forward biased, it will quickly
burn out.
8. Be careful when handling semiconductor components, as static electricity can destroy them.
MOSFETs are especially sensitive.
9. Test your circuit stage by stage as you assemble it. Resist the urge to wire up a big rat nest and then
plug it in to see what happens. If it doesn’t self destruct, at the very least it will be terribly difficult to
debug.
10. Use the bread boards when wiring your circuit, and try to keep the wiring 2-dimensional and neat,
preferably with an arrangement that mimics the schematic. You can simplify your circuit and
minimize the number of wires by using the component leads themselves to make most of the
connections. Fewer connections usually means greater reliability and easier debugging.
11. Check the DC bias voltages and currents before worrying about signals. If the DC bias is not correct,
then the amplifier will not work.
Lab Notebook:
A large part of your grade for this course will be based on your lab notebook. The grade will not
be based so much on whether your answers are “right” in the notebook. Rather, we will be looking to see
whether your notebook is complete. We won’t be able to judge whether it is complete unless we can
follow it easily, and we will not give you the benefit of the doubt. So, neatness and organization count in a
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Physics 160 Practical Electronics Spring 2011
big way. Keep your scribbling and scratch work separate from the “write-up” where you record you data
and results to be graded (both can be in the same notebook, but not on the same pages).
Here are some rules for the lab notebook:
The notebook shall be hard bound. Use the 10” by 8” bound “Comp Book” with quad ruling, as
can be purchased at the Bay Tree book store. You will need two such notebooks, for use in
alternating weeks (to allow us to grade one report while you are doing the next).
All work in the book shall be done in pen, not pencil.
There should be no pages torn from the book, and any deletion shall be made by drawing a single
line through the word or equation to be deleted, or an X over a figure to be deleted. Do not use
white-out to make corrections.
Each section in which work is reported shall be dated and shall be clearly labeled by the lab
number, section number, and descriptor (e.g. “7-3, Source Follower”).
Your writing and work shall flow from left to right and top to bottom. Writing shall be horizontal,
except possibly for labels on the vertical axes of graphs.
You shall use a straight edge for drawing straight lines, such as the axes of a graph or an “eyeball”
fit of your data to a straight line.
You must record all of your observations, both qualitative and quantitative, in the notebook for
each section of each lab. Your notebook entries will constitute your “write-up;” no formal document is
needed. Your notebook must clearly demonstrate that you did all parts of the lab and carefully observed
the results, answering all of the questions posed by the lab manual. If you take care, you can complete the
write-up while doing the lab, but in any case it must be sufficiently neat and organized that it can be easily
followed by the grader.
Lectures: although the emphasis of this course is on practical work, the fact that very few incoming
students have any experience with the theory of transistor circuits makes the lecture and homework
component essential. The point of the labs is not to build small projects according to recipes but rather to
learn the basic principles of analog circuit design and operation. It is crucial to understand all aspects of
the circuits while building them and making measurements. The lectures are meant to provide a foundation
for that understanding prior to each lab. It is important to read over the assigned material prior to the
lecture and lab. I will encourage that practice by assigning each week a short “reading quiz” to be
completed online in eCommons.
Homework: There will be 5 written assignments, due at 5 pm every other Friday. They will include the
design and simulation exercises discussed below. Note that the simulation exercises are not optional but
are required.
Circuit Simulation:
Some of the assignments for this course will require use of a computer. Specifically, you will
need to run circuit simulations on the computer. To do so, I recommend OrCAD PSpice software, which is
available from CADENCE for download on the web at no cost, for a demo version that will suffice for our
small projects. Only Windows PCs are supported. Note that the product does work on my Windows 7. Go
to http://www.cadence.com/products/orcad/pages/downloads.aspx and scroll down to where it says
“Download free OrCAD 16.5 Demo Software” and click on that link. You will have to follow the
instructions to establish a free account with CADENCE in order to complete the download. You will then
come to a page to select what to download. Select OrCAD 16.5 Demo Software (Capture and PSpice
only). The download will be a .zip file from which you have to extract everything and then execute the
“setup.exe” program. I can help you if you have difficulties with this. I will also make available in the lab
as many Windows PCs as possible with the software already installed.
The OrCAD software includes a “schematic capture” program, which allows you to make a
graphical schematic of your circuit by clicking and dragging parts and “wires.” You can then run the
simulation directly from that schematic. I will demonstrate how to do this during some of the lecture
sessions. There also are several library books listed below that explain how to use PSpice, and I have
prepared a tutorial and posted it to the web page. If you prefer a different Spice-based circuit simulator that
you are already familiar with, then you are welcome to use it for our assignments, but I may not be able to
support it.
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Physics 160 Practical Electronics Spring 2011
Exams: There will be only one exam, the final exam, which is scheduled at the normal time for a M,W,F
12:30 lecture period: Wednesday, June 13, from 4:00 to 7:00 pm.
Grading: 20% of your grade will be based on homework, 30% will be based on the final exam, 5% will be
based on classroom participation and reading quizzes, and 45% will be based on your lab notebook (as
graded by your TA).
In addition to the textbook, here are some possible references from the library.
P. Tuinenga, SPICE: a Guide to Circuit Simulation and Analysis Using PSpice, Prentice Hall.
M. Rashid, SPICE for Circuits and Electronics Using PSpice, Prentice Hall.
J. Svoboda, PSpice for Linear Circuits, Wyley.
J. Nilsson and S. Riedel, Introduction to PSpice, Addison-Wesley.
I. Sinclair, Practical Electronics Handbook, Oxford.
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Physics 160 Practical Electronics Spring 2011
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