ECE60L, Components & Circuits Laboratory (Spring 2002)
Farrokh Najmabadi


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NOTICES:

Final Scores and Course Grades are posted. I have left Lab 7 report next to my office door. You can pick up your final from my assistant Allisa Becker in 460 EBUII (across the hall from my office).

Click here for the distribution of final scores.

Click here for the distribution of course grade.

Solution to Final

Overall, a good class (average grade B-), Most of the students have understood the concepts. I enjoyed having you in my class. Keep up the good work!

Observations on the Final:

Problem 1. (OpAmp) A sizable minority of students do not understand concept of series and parallel elements and/or cannot do node-voltage method. Ladies & Gents, you need to know this if you want to be a EE.

Problem 2. (RLC filter design) This was a repeat of similar problem in midterm and again a sizable minority could not do it.

Problem 3. (FET biasing) Almost all of the students replaced the biasing resistors with their Thevenin equivalent (Great!). But again, a sizable minority had problems writing a simple KVL to get the answers (did not include 1K resistor).

Problem 4. (BJT amplifier design). Almost everyone did this. Great Job!

Problem 5. (FET NOR gate). Admittedly, this was the hard problem of the lot. Only a few completed the problem. But a lot of students made good progress. Good Job.

Problem 6. (Active bandpass filter). The "approximate" formulas for lower and upper cut-off frequency of this filter are valid only if W_c2 >> W_c1. only a handful of students commented on this. A good portion solved part b. Great!

Problem 7. (BJT amplifier). Almost everyone got the Q point right. A large majority got the AC response correctly.

General
1) Grades tremendously suffered because a lot of students cannot solve circuits and also do sloppy work.
2) A large fraction of students have difficulty with units of frequency (rad/s versus Hz).
3) A large number of students refuse to use engineering/scientific notations, i.e., use 1000000 instead of 10^6 or 1 M (or worth, 2154212.764 instead of 2.15 X 10^6, do you believe in all those significant digits?). This is a recipe for making huge mistakes in your math. Put your calculator display into Scientific Mode! Keep only three significant digits!

The following two useful write-ups describe the fundamentals of Scopes and Probes.

XYZs of Oscilloscopes (Look under Application Notes)

XYZ of Probes (Look under Application Notes)

Most of documents on this Web site (lab exercises, lecture notes, etc.) are posted in Adobe Acrobat (pdf) format. Most browsers are capable of reading pdf files. You can also get the latest version of Adobe Acrobat reader from Adobe Web Site.

For large pdf files posted on the Web (MB and bigger), you get a much better response time by downloading the whole file and then using Acrobat reader to read the down loaded file. This is the default for Netscape but not on Explorer (Explorer 6 seems to work fine though). When you read a large pdf file with Explorer, depending on its settings, you may get the file partially downloaded and you may have to wait when you are scrolling through the file (or worse, the document is chopped off at the bottom). The best approach with Explorer is to download the complete file (put the pointer on the link, press right button of your mouse and use "save-as" option) and use Acrobat reader to open and print the file.

An even better approach is NOT to install acrobat reader as a "plug-in" to your browser. In this case, the browser is forced to download the whole file and then launch acrobat reader.
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