Course Catalogue

LJMU Partner Taught

This module builds up from physical principles including our understanding of the atom, the concept of electrical charge, electric fields, and the behaviour of the electron in different types of material. This understanding is applied to electric circuits of different types, and the basic circuit laws and electrical components emerge. Another set of principles is built around semiconductor devices, which become the basis of modern electronics. An introduction to semiconductor theory leads to a survey of the key electronic components, primarily different types of diodes and transistors. The amplifier and its characteristics are introduced and simple circuits made from logic gates are considered.

Outline Syllabus:Fundamental electrical quantities and concepts Circuit laws: voltage sources, Ohm’s law, resistors in series and parallel, the potential divider, Kirchhoff’s and Thevenin’s laws; superposition Energy and power Fundamental quantities of periodic waveforms: frequency, period, peak value, phase angle, waveforms Mathematical techniques: trigonometric representation of a sinusoid, rotating phasors and the phasor diagram, complex notation applied to represent magnitude and phase Reactive components: inductor and capacitor, current and voltage phase relationships with steady sinusoidal quantities, representation on phasor diagram Circuits with sinusoidal sources: series and parallel RL, RC and RLC circuits, frequency response and resonance, power, root-mean-square power quantities, power factor Ideal transformer and rectification: the ideal transformer, half-wave and full-wave rectification, use of smoothing capacitor, ripple voltage Semiconductor materials: characteristics of semiconductors; impact of doping, p-type and n-type semiconductor materials, the p-n junction in forward and reverse bias Bipolar and field effect transistor types, the bipolar transistor as switch and amplifier Simple semiconductor applications Analogue concepts: analogue quantities Amplifier: gain, frequency response, input and output resistance, effect of source and load resistance Digital concepts: logic circuits implemented with switches or relays Use of voltages to represent logic 0 and 1, binary counting Logic Gates (AND, OR, NAND, NOR) to create simple combinational logic functions, truth tables