PHY 440 - Electronics

Spring 2013

	Pawel Danielewicz, Professor Email: danielew@msu.edu Phone: (517) 908-7330, 5-9672 x 330 from campus Office: 2057 Cyclotron Office hours: Wed 10:00 am - 11:00 am in 1254 BPS (or by appointment)
	Christopher Wrede, Professor Email: wrede@nscl.msu.edu Phone: (517) 908-7581 , 5-9672 x 581 from campus Office: 2018 Cyclotron Office hours: Tue 10:30 am - 11:30 am in 1254 BPS
	Winston Carr, Teaching Assistant Email: carrwins@msu.edu Office: E172 Engineering Research Complex Office hours: Thu 10:30 am - 11:30 am in 1254 BPS

SIRS: Please remember to fill out the SIRS form for this course.

Objectives: The aim of this course is to give students a practical introduction to modern electronic circuits. The course consists of three weekly lectures where the theory and principles of electronic circuits will be discussed, and a three hour laboratory where students will get some hands-on experience with electronic circuits and a variety of instrumentation such as digital oscilloscopes, pulsers, power supplies and digital multimeters. The topics covered in the course will start with simple DC circuits and end in computer design of programmable logic devices (PLDs). In between, we will study AC circuits, filters, diodes, bipolar transistors, FETs, operational amplifiers and a variety of digital circuits. Where possible we will make use of computer programs such as LabView and software from the Xilinx corporation to program field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs).

Required Textbook: Electronics and Communications for Scientists and Engineers*, Martin Plonus, 2001.
Publisher: Harcourt/Academic Press
ISBN-10: 0-12-533084-7, ISBN-13: 978-0125330848
Misprint corrections can be found here and more here.

Other Potentially Useful Texts:
The Art of Electronics*, P. Horowitz and W. Hill - advanced reference, indispensable for anybody tying his career to electronics; Principles of Electronic Instrumentation*, A. J. Diefenderfer and B. E. Holton - previous textbook for PHY440, while older has more focus on scientific applications; Electronics A Complete Course*, Nigel P. Cook - plenty of detail in basics but cursory within advanced topics.

*On reserve at the Engineering Library.

Homework: Weekly homework assignments, see the schedule, will be normally due at the beginning of Wednesday lecture, for the material from the preceding week.

Quizzes: Quizzes will be given unannounced during lecture; there will be roughly fourteen quizzes throughout the semester. Non-programmable scientific calculators are required for the quizzes, therefore please bring a calculator to each lecture.

Clicker Questions: Clicker questions will be asked during lectures for credit. Therefore, please bring along your i-Clicker to each lecture. You need to communicate the number for your i-Clicker at the Angel site for the class.

Laboratory Procedures and Notebook: The laboratory part of the course consists of a series of experiments that students will perform working alone. Students will be provided with a lab notebook into which they will enter all relevant information associated with an experiment. The laboratory exercises will be performed during 2h50min long lab-periods. The data entered into the notebook will be left at the laboratory, for grading by an instructor. No other formal write up will be required, but students are cautioned to enter all relevant data and explanations clearly and succinctly so that the grader can easily follow the work done. No erasures or page removal is allowed. (This follows standards for maintaining lab notebooks within research practice.) If an error is made, it should be neatly crossed out and the corrected data re-entered. In general, there are no make-up labs (rare exceptions can be made with advance notice, when it is possible to work the make-up lab into the schedule).
Note: There is no time during the lab to learn theory needed for the particular lab. You should read ahead of time the lab instructions, learn the theory and come prepared. The tasks marked by (*) in the lab instructions should be carried out ahead of the lab. Further lab tips can be found here. Examples of notebook pages can be found here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. In spite of the delayed start of the labs, in rare circumstances the lab exercises may be getting ahead of the lectures and they may pertain to an area which is not broadly discussed in the lecture.

Grading policies

Angel site for the course will be used for storing lecture notes under 'Lessons', and for accessing class scores, under 'Report'.

Last revised: January 8, 2013.