The aim of the Electronics & Sensors course is to introduce students to the basic concepts associated with analogue and digital electronics. The analogue electronics part of this course focuses on the operation of semiconductor devices, diode and transistor circuits, and sensors. In the digital electronics part, students will learn about binary systems and logic circuit design.
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Syllabus
Analogue electronics: semiconductors, doping, PN junctions, diode, diode circuits, bipolar junction transistor (BJT), BJT circuits (BJT amplifiers, BJT logic inverter, etc.), field-effect transistor (FET), MOSFET circuits (MOSFET amplifiers, CMOS logic circuits, etc.).
Digital electronics: binary and hexadecimal representations, binary arithmetic, Boolean algebra, logic gates, combinational circuits, arithmetic circuits, truth tables and Karnaugh maps, sequential circuits, flip-flops (D and RS), finite-state machines and implementation of arbitrary sequences, e.g. up-down counter.
Design, application, and operation of typical sample sensors used across the Engineering disciplines (Mechanical, Electrical, Civil).
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From 2020 to 2023, I was teaching the analogue electronics part of this module, consisting essentially of chapters on semiconductors, diodes, and bipolar junction transistors, and BJT amplifier design.
My lecture notes on semiconductors can be accessed here.
Most (but not all) diodes are designed based on the junction between a P-type semiconductor and an N-type semiconductor. They find a wide range of applications in electronics. For instance, they can be employed to process signals, convert physical quantities, such as temperature and light intensity, into electric currents, and also convert electric signals into light (LEDs, laser).
In addition, their principles of operation are at the core of more advanced devices such as bipolar junction and field-effect transistors. In other words, it is necessary to understand very well the operation of diodes before jumping into the study of these transistors.
The teaching materials on diodes consist of a set of lecture notes and a tutorial sheet (with solutions).
Bipolar-junction transistors (BJTs) can be found in various forms, e.g. the traditional version introduced in 1947 that is studied in this course or the more advanced heterojunction BJT (HBT) that can operate at very high frequencies.
BJTs were once used to design digital electronic circuits, but they have, since the early 1980s, been completely replaced for this type of applications by metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistors (MOSFETs) . In fact, the high power consumption of BJT circuits makes it impossible to integrate more than a few thousands of transistors into a single silicon chip, which is clearly not good enough in today’s technological world.
In 2023, BJTs are thus essentially used for analogue electronics and more particularly for the design of high-gain amplifiers. At its core, a BJT is primarily a current amplifier with a large gain. As such, it is undoubtedly the ideal semiconductor device for the many applications requiring the amplification of a signal.
The teaching materials on BJTs consist of two sets of lecture notes and a tutorial sheet (with solutions). The first set of lecture notes include a chapter on BJT amplifier design, whereas the second set provides more thorough explanations on BJTs, but does not address the issue of amplifier design.
There are several types of field-effect transistors (FETs), e.g. the good old junction FET (JFET), the metal-semiconductor FET (MESFET) that has been traditionally very popular for radio-frequency and microwave applications due to its ability to operate at very high frequencies, and, above all, the king of electronics, the metal-oxide-semiconductor FET (MOSFET), which is extensively used in computers, smart phones, and all other digital electronic devices.
We should also mention the FinFET, a “vertical” version of the traditional MOSFET, which has been employed since 2011 for the design of state-of-the-art microprocessors. With the FinFET technology, it has now possible to manufacture integrated circuits using transistors that are only a few nanometres long. For instance, the AMD Ryzen 2 microprocessor introduced in 2019 by Advanced Micro Devices Inc. employs 3.9 billion transistors (7-nm process) and has a maximum clock frequency of 4.7 GHz. The design of such extremely complex circuits was made possible by the CMOS technology, that combines N-channel and P-channel MOSFETs on the same silicon chip and allows for the implementation of logic gates with (almost) zero static power consumption.