ENGRD 2100 - Introduction to Circuits for Electrical and Computer Engineers

(crosslisted) ECE 2100

Fall, Spring. 4 credits. Letter grades only.

Prerequisite: MATH 1920 or PHYS 1112. Corequisite: MATH 2930 or PHYS 2213.

Fall: C. Pollock; Spring: K. Afridi.

This course is an introduction to electronic circuits. We start with the basic quantities used to characterize circuit operation (like current, voltage, and power) and then enforce several physical laws to form the basis of our approach to circuit analysis. Networks comprising passive circuit elements such as resistors, inductors, and capacitors will be examined under constant dc, transient, and sinusoidal steady-state conditions. Active components including transistors and Op-Amps will be introduced and used to build simple amplifiers and switching power converters. Many of these ideas will be unified mathematically through the use of Laplace transforms and associated transfer functions. In the lab part of the course, we will learn how to use modern instruments to test circuits, and explore the concepts from lecture applied to real circuits. Finally, we will develop some simple modeling software in MATLAB to numerically predict the results from analysis and experiment.