## RC Circuit Analysis

### What you will learn

• Software: relatively basic constructs. Iterative solver!
• Domain: A better feel for a capacitor charging and discharging and the time constant.

### RC Circuits

Take as input values of R (in Ohms), C (in Farads), and supply voltage (in Volts). Assume that the voltage is applied to a series RC circuits at time t=0t=0, and calculate the voltage across the capacitor at different times. Plot these!

#### Variations:

• Determine how much time it will take to charge the capacitor to a target voltage.
• Vary R to see how the curve shifts. Determine the value of C so that the shift is exactly the same. Which has a larger effect?
• Repeat for discharging the capacitor, rather than charging it

Apply a square wave as input and simulate for a few cycles. Vary the period and duty cycle and see if the behavior matches your intuition

## CMOS Characterization

### What you will learn:

• Software: relatively simple implementation, plus some visualization
• Domain: improve your understanding of how a transistor works

### CMOS Characterization – 1

A CMOS transistor operates in three different regions — cutoff, saturation, and linear. The equations for these are fairly straightforward. Implement these using hard-coded values for parameters that you may need to specify, such as doping concentrations, mobility, etc.

Given input voltages, determine the region of operation and use the appropriate equation to calculate $I_{DS}$

### CMOS Characterization – 2

• Calculate $I_{DS}$ for different values of $V_{GS}$ and $V_{DS}$
• Plot $I_{DS}$ v. $V_{DS}$ for different values of  $V_{GS}$

### CMOS Characterization – 3

• Analyze the differences between N- and P-MOS transistors
• What is the impact of transistor dimensions?
• Read transistor parameters from a file and repeat for different technology nodes.

## Programming for the Electronics Engineering Student

### Motivation

I’ve had a few odd discussions with students from the Electronics branch related to software development. Broadly,

• sniff I’m in electronics, don’t expect me to dabble in ugh software
• We don’t get the subjects that CS students do, so aren’t as prepared for interviews as they are
• eh, I’m just going to do it

There’s so much to unpack here…

Firstly, software (and data structures, and algorithms, and …) is not the domain of any one branch. It is a tool to be used just like any other and a very powerful tool at that. So if you’re being snobbish about not doing any software at the altar of “electronics,” you’re just shooting yourself in the foot. Most electronics is software, and the more comfortable you are with this tool, the better of an electronics engineer you will be. Plus, software can help you understand electronics much more than you otherwise would.

Second, there are a lot of opportunities to develop software skills. The courses that you don’t get to do aren’t all that important, you can learn the core concepts by yourself. There are a few (Databases!) that you won’t get exposure to, but you haven’t really missed much. Read on!

Finally, self-study is the best way to develop these skills. Here’s the big secret:

the only way to learn how to program …. is to program

### The obvious question is: “what do I program?”

This is a series of posts that presents program suggestions, what to look for and what to focus on. If you go through these, you will be a better electronics engineer and a better software developer than 99% of your peers, irrespective of their major. I’ve gone through the typical subjects from the second year onwards, and defined assignments that (i) build on the theory that you learn (ii) expose you to different implementation concepts (iii) improve your understanding of data structures and algorithms

### One last thing: the discipline of programming

• All your implementation should have a reasonable testing strategy in place
• All your code should be instrumented to measure the performance of key parts of the code
• All C and C++ code should be compiled with -Wall
• All code should be valgrind-certified error-free
• All code should be in a version control system

I’ll talk about each of these points in a later post.

now let’s

Shut Up and Code!

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