Publisher's Synopsis
This is a lab manual for a hands on, two semester, first electronics lab course that has been taught to approximately 120 sophmore and junior students each year at Louisiana State University. The emphasis is first on understanding the characteristics of basic circuits including resistors, capacitors, diodes, and bipolar and field effect transistors. The students then use this understanding to construct more complex circuits such as power supplies, differential amplifiers, tuned circuit amplifiers, a transistor curve tracer, and a digital voltmeter. In addition, students are exposed to special topics of current interest, such as the propagation and detection of signals through fiber optics, the use of Van der Pauw patterns for precise linewidth measurements, and high gain amplifiers based on active loads. *Application of basic principles to create useful instruments. At the end of the first semester the student builds a transistor curve tracer, and at the end of the second semester a digital voltmeter. This is a very strong lesson that "black boxes" are not to be feared, that one can not only understand but actually build what is in them.;If a professor can instill that level of confidence, most of the battle is won. *Organized as a series of labs, of increasing difficulty and complexity, all of which can be completed in two hours. Simplifies course logistics. *Some fairly sophisticated material included. Gives the student an advantage when he/she encounters similar devices later on in his/her profession. *P-SPICE assignments. The student gains familarity with P-SPICE and uses it to compliment his/her experimental results. *Questions. Non trivial questions are scattered throughout the laboratory experiments, and are to be addressed in the laboratory report. These questions force the student to think about what he/she is doing, and not to simply "take data," and they encourage the student to try related experiments rather than to just follow the steps.
