Instructor

David Abrams

Course Description

the fall 2022 version of 123a/223a will not teach the full course material of Learning the Art of Electronics.  It will cover the analog half only, including dc circuits, rc circuits in the frequency domain and time domain, rlc circuits, filters, bipolar transistors, operational amplifiers, instrumentation amplifiers, lock-in amplifiers, voltage regulations, pid controllers, mosfets, jfets and phase-clocked loops.  We will not cover the digital portion of the material so if you only need to learn about digital logic, programmable logic and/or embedded microcontrollers, you should wait until the digital second half course is offered in spring 2023. The two parts of the course are designed to be self-contained, with little overlap, so you can take one, the other or both depending on your interests and needs.

Please feel free to contact me (dabrams@fas.harvard.edu) with any questions about the course.

This course surveys practical analog electronics, starting from Ohm’s Law through complex analog circuits, with little mathematical or physical explanation but much opportunity to design and build circuits. Each of the class meetings devotes up to 2 1/2 hours to a laboratory session. The small class size allows a format closer to seminar than to ordinary lecture. Since the course aims above all to enable students to design useful circuits, it concentrates on the most effective techniques for learning analog electronics and designing analog circuits.

We start with an introduction to the analog circuits basics: voltage, current, resistance and capacitance.  We then look at other passive devices including diodes, inductors, and transformers used to build filters, unregulated power supplies and AM receivers.  The rest of the course uses active devices starting with bipolar transistors (“BJTs”) which we initially use to buffer and amplify signals, then connected to create the building block of analog circuits, the operational amplifier.  The remainder of the course uses op amps to create computational circuits like integrators, summing amplifier, differentiators, instrumentation amplifiers and lock-in amplifiers.  We will look at complex feedback loops to create PID controllers and discuss stability consideration in op amp and BJT circuits both to create oscillators and to stop circuits from oscillating.  We will use MOSFET transistors as switches, JFETs as variable resistors, discuss voltage regulation and look at phase locked loops.  The course ends with a project of your choosing that uses the circuits and techniques we have learned in class.

The course covers about 65%  of material the material in the combined analog/digital course. Hopefully that will make the course somewhat more manageable.

Prerequisite: secondary school algebra and, preferably, a course in basic physics.

Notes:

Limited to 20 students (total both 123a and 223a). Physics 123a is also offered as Physics 123a. Students may only take one for credit. Undergraduate physics students should enroll in Physics 123a. Graduate students should enroll in Physics 223a. Both registrations use this Physics 223a Canvas site.