EC3300: Analog Circuits Lab, Jan.-May 2011
Coordinators
Schedule
Q slot(Tuesdays, 2-5pm) in the
IE lab.
The lab will be kept open on Saturdays from 9am to 12pm and 2pm to 5pm for you to assemble/debug your circuits.
Teaching assistants
The TAs can be contacted at ec330 dot 2011 at gmail dot com
Evaluation
Lab sessions
The lab sessions are meant for verification and measurement of circuits that you design, and not for assembly. Assemble your circuits before coming to the lab session. The experiments will be posted in advance on this page.
Tidy up at the end of the session: Clean up your table, push the stools you used under the table, return any borrowed components to the staff in charge
Notify staff of defective equipment
If you are unable to finish an experiment in a session, move on to the next in the following session. If you finish that early, go back to the earlier experiment and complete it. You can also use the saturday sessions to finish incomplete experiments. But you can show them to the TAs for grading only in the regular lab sessions.
Attendance
Attendance will be strictly enforced and those falling short will receive a W
Sign in your attendance with the TA as you enter the lab. If you arrive more than 10 minutes late to the lab, you will not be admitted
Prerequisites
Instructions
Go through the data sheets of relevant components for each experiment
Wire up the circuit (neatly!) before coming to the lab session. No debugging assistance will be given for overly messy wiring. Use colour coded wiring-i.e. red for positive supply, black for ground, green for negative supply, and others for signals. Cut wires to appropriate lengths so that they can be routed flush on the breadboard instead of forming messy loops over it. The same goes for resistors.
Test your circuit during the lab session
Maintain a lab notebook in which you briefly record the results and troubleshooting information
Be familiar with component pinouts. You don't want to be connecting opamps in positive feedback or driving the outputs of gates with signals.
Draw schematics of the experiments with expected bias voltages, bias currents, and signal levels marked on them. This is a very good debugging aid.
List of Components: Each group must have the following
Get the component kit from IE lab on Monday(10th Jan.) after 3pm.
Breadboard (2)
Wire stripper (1)
Nose pliers (1)
Hook up wire (single strand): 4m each of red, blue, yellow, green, black
Digital Multimeter (1)
BNC to alligator cables (4)
ICs: CD4069(4), MC1496(2), LF347(5), LM311(2), 74LS00(2), 7402(2)
Transistors: BC107(8), BC177(8)
Experiments
Information for experiments will be put up on this page in advance so that you can come prepared to the lab. Familiarise yourselves with the characteristics of the components by reading the data sheets of the components given below. Many experiments are based on using CMOS inverters as transconductors. Understand the principles by going through this lecture.
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19 Apr. 2011: Final exam
Component data sheets
Go through these data sheets before wiring up the circuit. Pay particular attention to pinouts, power supply polarity, and maximum voltage ratings.
See this link for a short description of different capacitor types. Use polyester film capacitors(yellow box) for filters.
Debugging
Whenever a circuit isn't behaving as expected, it pays to go through these steps systematically. This also applies when you simulate circuits and the results aren't as expected.
Verify that the power supplies and signal sources are on, and are correctly connected to the board.
Measure the power supplies and bias points, at the component pins. You may have “wired up” the circuit with loose wires or altogether incorrectly. This is where the schematic with expected bias and signal levels will be a great help
Bias points: Check these with a multimeter. Note that the multimeter's input resistance of 10MΩ, while much larger than the impedance of most circuits you will be dealing with, can disturb the bias of high impedance circuits.
supply levels
opamp inputs should be virtual shorts
opamp outputs should be well within swing limits for the given supplies
transistors' base-emitter drop should be about 0.65 V
transistors must be in their active regions(CB reverse biased)
Signal levels: You need to check these with an oscilloscope. An oscilloscope's input impedance (approx 1MΩ in parallel with 100pF) can disturb high frequency circuits. So use 10x mode where necessary. Generally many circuits we use are excited with periodic inputs and it is convenient to check the signals progressively through the circuit, starting from the input.
Measuring “AC” voltages with the multimeter: The digital voltmeter typically measures the average value of the rectified input and gives you readings in rms Volts assuming that the input is a sine wave. The readings will be horribly off if the input is not a sine wave. Also, the frequency response of the multimeter is only upto about 500Hz. So do not use the multimeter to measure ac signals unless you are absolutely sure of what you are doing.