LEARNING OUTCOMES

The course provides the basic knowledge needed for the analysis and design of simple electronic circuits, both analog and digital, aimed at performing physics measurements. Particular attention is paid to the use of laboratory instruments and the use of data acquisition techniques.

AIMS AND LEARNING OUTCOMES

By the end of the course, students will have developed the ability to:
- use the main tools adopted for the analysis of electronic circuits, having understood their operating principles;
- design and build analog circuits aimed at processing DC and AC signals;
- design digital circuits starting from the desired specifications or from the description of the algorithmic behavior to be implemented;
- interfacing microcontrollers and microprocessor systems with the aforementioned instruments and circuits;
- understand the project behind an experiment performing a physics measurement and relying heavily on electronic circuits, developing the critical thought to modify the project itself;
- communicate, using the correct technical / scientific language, the specifications of the circuits built in practice and the results of the experiments performed.

TEACHING METHODS

The course consists in theory lectures (about 80 hours) and laboratory exercises (about 80 hours)

Attendance is mandatory for the laboratory activities and highly recommended for the lectures.

SYLLABUS/CONTENT

Electric circuits operating in direct current. Current, voltage, power, Kirchhoff's laws. Resistors, voltage and current generators, both ideal and real. Node analysis, superposition principle, Thevenin and Norton theorems and equivalent circuits. Capacitors and inductors. Study of the transient and steady state behavior for first order circuits in series and in parallel.

Electric circuits operating in alternating current. Analysis of first order circuits in sinusoidal regime, in the time domain and using the phasor method. Frequency response and Bode diagrams. Second order circuits, RLC circuits, resonant circuits. Use of the LTSPICE simulation program.

Semiconductors, PN junction, diode, transistor, MOSFET. Integrated circuits, operational amplifier, inverting and non-inverting amplifier. Adder circuits, integrators, differentiators, comparators, rectifiers. Feedback and applications to circuits with operational amplifiers. Active filters: low pass, high pass, band pass. Four-wire measurements, instrumentation amplifier and its characterization.

Digital systems, Boole algebra and real implementation of logic gates. Combinatorial and sequential logic circuits. Digital / analog and analog / digital converters. Design of state machines and Karnaugh maps.

Programmable circuits and microcontrollers. Development of state machines and control programs; data acquisition via serial port and Arduino boards.

RECOMMENDED READING/BIBLIOGRAPHY

Millmann, Grabel / Millmann, Halkias - Microelectronics - McGraw-Hill
Horowitz, Hill - The art of electronics - Cambridge University Press

Lesson notes are made available on Aulaweb