Circuits and Electronics 1: Basic Circuit Analysis

Want to learn about circuits and electronics, but unsure where to begin? Wondering how to make computers run faster or your mobile phone battery last longer? This free circuits course taught by MIT Professor Anant Agarwal and colleagues is for you.

This is the first of three online Circuits & Electronics courses offered by Professor Anant Agarwal and colleagues at MIT, and is taken by all MIT Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) majors.

Topics covered include: resistive elements and networks; circuit analysis methods including KVL, KCL and the node method; independent and dependent sources; linearity, superposition, Thevenin & Norton methods; digital abstraction, combinational gates; and MOSFET switches and small signal analysis. Design and lab exercises are also significant components of the course.

Weekly coursework includes interactive video sequences, readings from the textbook, homework, online laboratories, and optional tutorials. The course will also have a final exam.

This is a self-paced course, so there are no weekly deadlines. However, all assignments are due when the course ends.

Course Description

6.002 is designed to serve as a first course in an undergraduate electrical engineering (EE), or electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) curriculum. At MIT, 6.002 is in the core of department subjects required for all undergraduates in EECS.

The course introduces the fundamentals of the lumped circuit abstraction. Topics covered include: resistive elements and networks; independent and dependent sources; switches and MOS transistors; digital abstraction; amplifiers; energy storage elements; dynamics of first- and second-order networks; design in the time and frequency domains; and analog and digital circuits and applications. Design and lab exercises are also significant components of the course. 6.002 is worth 4 Engineering Design Points. The 6.002 content was created collaboratively by Profs. Anant Agarwal and Jeffrey H. Lang.

What you will learn

• How to design and analyze circuits using the node method, superposition, and the Thevenin method
• How to employ lumped circuit models and abstraction to simplify circuit analysis
• How to use intuition to solve circuits
• Construction of simple digital gates using MOSFET transistors
• Measurement of circuit variables using tools such as virtual oscilloscopes, virtual multimeters, and virtual signal generators

Syllabus

Week 1: From physics to electrical engineering; lumped abstraction, KVL, KCL, intuitive simplification techniques, nodal analysis

Week 2: Linearity, superposition, Thevenin & Norton methods, digital abstraction, digital logic, combinational gates

Week 3: MOSFET switch, MOSFET switch models, nonlinear resistors, nonlinear networks

Week 4: Small signal analysis, small signal circuit model, dependent sources

Books

The course uses the required textbook Foundations of Analog and Digital Electronic Circuits. Agarwal, Anant, and Jeffrey H. Lang. San Mateo, CA: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, Elsevier, July 2005. ISBN: 9781558607354.