EE 204 – ANALOG CIRCUITS

Professor :

A.N. Chandorkar

Motivation :

The motivation of the course is that a student, at the end should :

  • Design and understand OPAMP and OPAMP based circuits with ease
  • Understand the capacitances involved with transistors and building various ckt representations, In-depth understanding of various amplifiers
  • Understand the various aspects of analog circuit design like feedback, frequency response, bode plots, stability criterias
  • Design and understand oscillators and active filters

More than this the course has many faces and introduces one to the broad aspects of practical electrical engg knowledge.

Course content and Structure:

The official content is here: https://www.ee.iitb.ac.in/web/academics/courses#EE204. It is followed more or less with little content edged off due to time constraints. The course ,broadly, can be divided into following modules:

  • Overview of Transistors – earlier part of this is covered in EE 112 . Basics of BJT and MOSFET. Later: basics of capacitances involved in devices and various circuit models, various amplifier configurations and their uses, study of frequency response – device behavior at low and high frequencies, bode plots.

  • OpAmp – Again, earlier part of this is covered in EE 112 . Ideal OpAmp and OpAmp based linear and non-linear circuits. Later: Real OpAmp, Construction of OpAmp using MOSFET and some parallel analogy to do so using BJTs. Also, includes broad topic of Differential Amplifiers or DiffAmps.

  • Feedback and Stability Criteria- Few of the most important topics with roots into control systems and lot of practical applications. Covers topics which broadly include – feedback applications, topologies and solving ckts with feedback along with various stability criteria like Nyquist Plot and Barkhausen Criteria. Alongwith OpAmp module, it helps out in EE 230 lab as well in designing your own OpAmp.

  • Oscillators and Active Filters – Application of analog knowledge. Includes study of various oscillators in brief and the fundamentals behind them – Wein Bridge Oscillator, RC phase shift oscillator, Crystal Oscillator, LC oscillators like Colpitt and Hartley oscillators. Also, gives introduction to active filters like Butterworth and Chebyshev filters.

This edition of course had 1 quiz (only theoretical questions), 1 test (only numerical questions) , 1 final assignment (having 37 questions covering the complete course) and midsem-endsem.

Endsem consisted of 2 parts – minor one having quiz like problems and major one having test like problems ( I know its very bad example of nomenclature but apparently Prof. Chandorkar prefers so!)

Prerequisites :

There are no prerequisites as such for EE dept but since it can be taken as Institute Elective, EE 101 is the prerequisite, but it is nothing that can not be done by putting in about a couple of extra hours for a week. Though a sound knowledge of EE 207 will be useful in understanding the material in depth.

Difficulty :

Moderately tough. Requires effort to be put in by students and self study.

Grading Stats:

Grading was pretty average and was neither liberal nor harsh.

Study Material and References :

MICROELECTRONIC CIRCUITS by Sedra, Smith and Chandorkar is concise book for the course, specifically if you believe in self study and not lectures. Cdeep has 2 editions of course recorded with video lectures and lecture notes, good if you believe in studying via reference.

Miscellaneous :

This course is probably the one which makes you work harder than any other core EE courses running in the sem. A lot of practice is needed to solve the problems in exam. The book referred has lot of solved problems along with unsolved (though I doubt you will have time for them unless for an assignment). Problems can vary from small theoretical questions like understanding various tradeoffs to grilling numericals an idea of which can be taken by the fact that this year endsem got extended from 3 hrs to 4.5 hrs with people still unable to finish the exam.

Advanced courses that can be taken after this course:

This course opens up a plethora of courses you can take like courses on VLSI, filter design, etc.

Review written by:

Pulkit Tandon (pulkit1495@gmail.com)