EE3C11 Electronics

This course has two parts: Electronics and Device Physics.
The Electronics part deals with structured design of analog electronic circuits. The design method presented in this course is based on network theory, control theory, signal processing and physics.

The design of analog electronic circuits is considered by many people to be complex. This is mainly because designers have to deal with many relevant performance aspects that can be achieved in many different ways. In other words, there are many degrees of freedom for obtaining the desired performance of an electronic circuit. Theoretical concepts, circuit topologies, electronic devices, their operating conditions and the physical lay-out of a system, together constitute an enormous design space in which it is easy to get lost. For this reason, analog electronics is often regarded as an art rather than a solid discipline.

Instead of taking numerous existing solutions to known problems as a starting point, it will be shown in this course that it is far more effective to start a new design with clear distinction between theoretical concepts and study how they can be implemented in such a way that the possibilities of the implementation technology are maximally exploited. Such an approach not only results in clear and reliable designs with predictable performance, but it also provides a basis for sharing and developing knowledge.

During the engineering phase, designers need to find real world components, determine their operating conditions and fix these conditions by design. To this end they need to formulate and solve so-called design equations for the circuit. For example, in order to determine a budget for the gain-bandwidth product of an operational amplifier, we must find relations between this gain-bandwidth product and the performance requirements of the circuit that comprises this operational amplifier. 

Setting up design equations for analog circuits, even for circuits based on operational amplifiers, is a difficult and cumbersome task. It requires knowledge about technology, modeling techniques and interactions between the behavior of the circuit and the properties of the operational amplifier. It goes hand in hand with symbolic analysis. For this, during this course we will use SLiCAP (Symbolic Linear Circuit Analysis Program). SLiCAP is written in MATLAB®.

Although the method is applicable to many different electronic systems, the focus in this course is on the design and implementation if high-performance operational amplifier circuits. (Transistor level details will be discussed in the master course EE410a9.)

The physics part of the course concentrates on the physical description of the most relevant transistors (bipolar and MOS based).

Device models play an important role in the translation of an ideal electrical network into an electronic circuit. These models contain parts that match the required ideal network theoretical behavior and parts that model the physical limitations. Electronic design is basically nothing more than finding the optimal electrical network that meets the system requirements and then translating it into a network that is physically realizable by gradually refining the models used and keeping the influence of non-idealities that are introduced to a minimum in the process.
It is important for professional designers to understand the physical background of the device models to be able to estimate the accuracy and the stability of the parameters. In the end this gives the expected performance of the circuit in the real physical world. It also gives clues for further technology improvement. It is important to know which parameters are most dominant in restricting the circuit performance. It is needed to select the technology that is best suited to meet all requirements or prove that the requirements are beyond (present) physical limits.

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Last modified: 2024-09-04