Basic Information
- Course Code: EE 207
- Course Name: Electronic Devices and Circuits
- Course Offered In: 2023-2024
- Semester Season: Spring
- Instructors: Ashwin Tulapurkar
- Prerequisites: None (1st year Physics Course may be useful)
- Difficulty (1 being easy and 5 being tough): 3
Course Content
Introduction to Energy Band Theory, PN Junction Diode: Current-Voltage relationships, carrier concentrations and Non-idealities, Bipolar Junction Transistor: Current-Voltage relationships, carrier concentrations and Transfer characteristics, Hetero-junctions, Metal-Semiconductor Junctions, MOS Capacitor: Charge Block Diagrams, Operating modes, non-idealities, MOSFET: Models of operation, non-idealities, Band Diagrams for all of the mentioned devices.
This course is essentially an introduction to semiconductor physics and devices. The course begins with the Quantum Mechanical foundations of Energy Bands and establishes some ground rules on which the rest of the course is based. After this point, only the basics of electrostatics and the rules derived earlier are needed to obtain all the working relationships, independent of QM. BJT was covered relatively less with respect to the other topics.
Feedback on Lectures
Lectures were not sufficient to get a full understanding of the concepts. The instructor mostly read out the slides directly, which were quite dense and had a lot of equations. Reading the textbook and going through the slides again were essential for full understanding.
Feedback on Evaluations
Marks split-up (chronological): Quiz 1 (10%), Midsem (27%), Quiz 2 (15%), Endsem (48%) Each mark in the exams corresponded to 1% of the grade. Attendance was taken but apparently didn’t play any role in the evaluation (no DX)
The exams were not too difficult but were quite lengthy and required a very significant amount of content to be studied - it is not advisable to do this the night before the exam. We were allowed to carry handwritten cheat sheets for exams. Many of the problems were formulaic. Learning how to draw the band diagrams and graphs was important.
In terms of grading, a lot of high grades as well as low grades were given. There was an approximately equal number of all letter grades.
Study Material and Resources
The slides contained all the relevant equations, but did not have any explanations for them. The instructor regularly gave tutorial sheets which consisted mostly of direct problems. The exam questions were quite similar to the tutorials and examples from the slides. Two textbooks by RF Pierret were followed almost directly:
- Advanced Semiconductor Fundamentals
- Semiconductor Device Fundamentals These books are well written and allow better conceptual understanding but can take quite a bit of time to read.
Follow-up Courses
EE620: Physics of Transistors provides a deeper look into the working of Semiconductor devices.
Final Takeaway
This course is a decent introduction to Semiconductor physics, but requires a significant investment of time to fully go through all the topics. Keep track of the lectures to avoid overloading.