ECE60L, Components & Circuits Laboratory (Spring 2004)
Farrokh Najmabadi


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NOTICES:

Final Scores and Course Grades are posted. You can pick up your final as well as your Lab reports from my assistant Paul Terry in 460D EBUII (across the hall from my office) in the afternoons (1-5).

Click here for the distribution of final scores and the distribution of course grade.

Click here for Solution of the final.

Final: Average: 41/70
Course Grade: Average: C+
There were clearly two groups of students in this class: 1) Students who understood the material (their average grade was between B+ and A-). Keep up the good work!
2) Students who had not done the work (average grade C-). My experience has shown that there is a clear correlation between course grade and class attendance. This class was one of my worst classes in terms of attendance! Ladies and gents, at some points you need to start thinking about your future.

Observations on the Final:

General
1) Grades tremendously suffered because a lot of students do sloppy work: messy write-up leading to forgetting terms, decimals moving around, etc. Several students in this class broke the record in turning in the most "unreadable" finals. Transistors were drawn with no arrows (how can one tell which end is emitter and which end is the collector?) or worse with a circle (cannot even say which end is the base!) A large portion of the class would have got a better grade if they had not made sloppy mistakes in their final!
2) Many students still do not grasp that they are trying to be an engineer not a mathematician. Numbers are quoted with many digits and/or 23 micro A was quoted 0.000023 A (What would you say if the lab instructions says set the amplitude of the signal to 0.000023 V?). One student had the record. Invariably these students made math mistakes carrying these extra digits around.
3) About half of the students still quote numbers without any UNITS. These numbers are meaningless.

Problem 1. (passive low-pass filter) Majority of the class got this right. Amazingly, some stundets claimed that R_L is in parallel to R in the circuit!

Problem 2. (Inverting Amplifier and Integrator) Almost everyone got the inverter right. Some got the fact that the 2nd circuit is an integrator. Only one person in the class got the correct design. This was a circuit you had worked in the Lab! Although the problem clearly stated that "Assume OpAmps are ideal," a good number of students looked at various limitation of OpAmp chips!

Problem 3. (Biasing of the Darlington Pair). Majority of students got this problem right. Good job!

Problem 4. (CMOS NOR Gate). Another Lab problem. About half of the class got most of this problem right. A sizable minority cannot write the KVLs correctly.

Problem 5. (BJT amplifier). Almost everyone got this right. However a large number of math errors and/or dropped terms, invariably from students who turn in a messy/unreadable final.

Problem 6. (OpAmp) About half of students did this problem correctly. A large fraction wrote a node equation at V_o forgetting about the controlled voltage source which is attached to the output of the OpAmp chip.

Problem 7. (BJT two-stage amplifier). Almost all of the student labeled the current in the 1k resistor as I_E1. The current out of BJT emitter is I_E! The problem hint was supposed to reinforce that.

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

XYZs of Oscilloscopes (Look under Resources/Application Notes/Primers)

XYZ of Probes (Look under Resources/Application Notes/Primers)

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