Understanding modern electronics
(DVD)

Course No. 1162.

Includes bibliographic reference in course guidebook (pages 195-198).

Lecturer: Richard Wolfson, Middlebury college.

From the course guidebook. Electronic devices are woven into the fabric of 21st-century life. Some -- your smartphone, your laptop computer, your flat screen TV -- are obvious. Others -- the myriad electronic sensors, computers, and controls that keep your car running at top efficiency; the microcontrollers that increasingly find their way into the most humble of kitchen appliances; the smart electric meters that help manage your household energy consumption -- ply their electronic magic largely hidden from view. And devices that were once purely mechanical -- thermometers, bathroom scales, clocks and watches -- are now largely electronic. In the context of this electronic world, Understanding Modern Electronics has two purposes, either one of which provides ample reason to view and participate actively in this course. First, the understanding this course provides can enhance your appreciation and effective use of electronic devices. Second, for those who might want to go on to build their electronic circuits, the course lays the groundwork of basic electronic concepts, introduces the building blocks of electronic circuits, and develops many important circuits used in modern electronics. The course begins by distinguishing electronics from electricity, introduces basic electrical and electronic concepts, and quickly moves into electronic circuitry. You will learn the language of electronic circuit diagrams and meet new and useful electronic components. After a look at AC versus DC, power supply circuits, and electronic filters (for, among other things, bass/tremble controls and noise reduction), the course introduces the semiconductors that are at the heart of modern electronics. Focusing on transistors -- among the most important inventions of the 20th century -- the course then describes how these devices are used as amplifiers. By the end of this section, you will have a strong grasp of the workings of the audio amplifiers that are in everything from phones to televisions to stereo systems. The course then turns to operational amplifiers -- versatile, inexpensive, integrated-circuit devices that function not only as amplifiers for audio and for electronic instruments but can also add, subtract, accumulate, and serve as oscillators to generate useful electronic signals and sounds. Op-amps achieve their versatility through the magic of negative feedback; thus, this section of the course begins with a look at the feedback concepts and the many systems -- electronic and otherwise -- that make use of negative feedback. Practical applications discussed here include an electronic thermometer, a light meter, and servomechanisms that allow us to control, with exquisite precision, the movement of massive machinery. To this point, the course has emphasized analog electronics -- circuits in which electrical quantities are analogs of continuously varying physical quantities, such as sound temperature, and brightness. But today's electronic circuits are increasingly digital, encoding information as quantities that can take on only two values -- the binary digits 0 and 1. The penultimate section of the course begins with digital basics, introducing the logical operations that are at the heart of all digital processing, including computers, then explores contemporary electronic realizations of these digital logic operations. The course goes on to build more sophisticated digital circuits, including computer memory circuits, electronic counters, frequency dividers (used in digital watches), and circuits that let computers exchange information with peripheral devices or help cell phones stream your voice over the airwaves as a sequence of digital 1s and 0s. The final section of the course shows how electronic circuits convert information from the analog world of everyday life to the world of digital processing -- and back again. Important examples include cell phone communications and contemporary music recording, distribution, and playback; these examples bring together material from throughout the entire arc of the course. The course ends with a lecture on electronics in your future, showing how continued miniaturization and the associated increase in the power of electronic circuits will bring sophisticated electronics into virtually every aspect of 21st-century life. You can learn about electronics as a purely intellectual exercise, and this course will help you do so. But electronics is also an active pursuit, whether at the hobbyist's workbench or in the engineer's laboratory. Throughout Understanding Modern Electronics, you'll get many practical tips about building electronic circuits and working with electronic instruments. Although the course doesn't provide you with actual hands-on experience, it comes close -- through the use of electronic circuit simulation software that's web-based, independent of what type of computer or even tablet you use, and free or at low cost. If you choose to do the projects at the end of each lecture, you'll use this software to build, explore, troubleshoot, and even design electronic circuits that are almost like the real thing (pages 1-3).

DVD.