Applications Open now for May 2025 Batch | Applications Close: May 20, 2025 | Exam: July 13, 2025

Applications Open now for May 2025 Batch | Applications Close: May 20, 2025 | Exam: July 13, 2025

Foundation Level

Electronic Systems Thinking and Circuits

The course is intended to provide an insight into electronics systems that are commonly encountered in daily life centered around sense-compute-communicate. The course will begin with a tear down of a laptop and/ or a mobile phone and looking at the various components. The standout component on the board is the battery which naturally leads to an introduction to voltage and finite energy sources. The course will then go on to identify a couple of ICs on the board like the processor, the RF components all connected to the same power source, each drawing its own current which can be used to motivate the idea of KCL. Basic network analysis will be covered as part of the theory to go hand in hand with these topics. Simple experiments will be conducted on a breadboard to demonstrate the theory where applicable. The idea of a microprocessor and memory will be explained with the help of analogies in an abstract manner.

by Prof. Sankaran Aniruddhan , Prof. Boby George , Prof. Janakiraman Viraraghavan

Course ID: EE1101

Course Credits: 4

Course Type: Foundation

Pre-requisites: None

What you’ll learnVIEW COURSE VIDEOS

Perform basic network analysis and analyse circuits using KCL, KVL, Thevinin’s theorem, Norton’s theorem, Simplifying resistor and capacitor networks
Perform time domain analysis of first order RC networks
Explain the idea of microprocessor and a memory
Explain the idea of a program stored in a memory

Course structure & Assessments

4 credit course, weekly online assignments, 2 in-person invigilated quizzes, 1 in-person invigilated end term exam. For details of standard course structure and assessments, visit Academics page.

WEEK 1 Introduction,Miniaturization of electronic packaging,Mobile teardown,How small can a mobile phone get?,The battery,The charger,Back of the envelope calculations,The resistor,The Theory.
WEEK 2 Introduction to "Voltage",Introduction to "Current" and Ohms Law,Series and parallel connection of voltage and current sources,I-V characteristics of Resistors, voltage and current sources,Nodal Analysis and KCL,Mesh Analysis and KVL,Measurement of simple resistive circuit,Series and parallel connection of resistors,Introduction to capacitors, Introduction to inductors,Capacitance and Inductance measurement
WEEK 3 Dial, Talk and Hear,The Microphone,Motor and Generator,The Sinusoid,Energy of time varying signals,Harmonics,Electricity consumption at home
WEEK 4 Problem Solving - Getting Started,Problem Solving - Lower and upper bounds ,Problem Solving - More Complex Problems,Problem Solving - Resistive Ladder,Problem Solving - Wheatstone's bridge,Problem Solving - Resistive Cube
WEEK 5 Analog Mixer,Resistive Analog Mixer,Analog Mixer : Simulation,Superposition principle,Analog Mixer using superposition,Linear electrical components,Series and parallel resistive networks,Numerical examples on superposition
WEEK 6 The Non-Inverting Amplifier,The Inverting Amplifier,Power Conventions ,The RC Step Response - Experiment,The RC Step Response - Theory
WEEK 7 Low Pass Filter - Experiment,Low Pass Filter - Theory,High Pass Filter - Analysis,High Pass Filter - Experiment,Band Pass Filter -Design,Band Pass Filter -Experiment,First order analysis: Limitations
WEEK 8 Problem Solving - Resistive Analog Mixer ,Problem Solving - Resistive Analog Mixer using superposition,Problem Solving - Superposition - Voltage sources,Problem Solving - Homogeneity Principle,Problem Solving - Power absorbed by circuit elements ,Problem Solving- Superposition - Current / Voltage sources -1,Problem Solving- Superposition - Current / Voltage sources - 2
WEEK 9 Analog vs Digital Audio Representations,Time Quantization,Amplitude Quantization,Sample and Hold Circuit,Flash ADC,Charge Sharing,Switched Capacitors,Capacitive Mixer
WEEK 10 Laptop Teardown, Binary Number System, Decimal to Binary Number Conversion, Calculating Wave File Size, Analog vs Digital Computing, Digital Compute Blocks, Lab Instructions - 1
WEEK 11 Wired Communication - The Experiment,Wired Communication - Inductive Ringing,Wired Communication - Summary,Wireless Communication - The Radio,Wireless Communication - Modulation Techniques,Wireless Communication - Amplitude Modulation,Wireless Communication - Frequency Modulation,Wireless Communication - The Antenna
WEEK 12 Problem Solving - LPF Energy,Problem Solving - Current Source and Capacitors,Problem Solving - Current Source, Capacitors, and Resistors,Problem Solving - Switched Capacitors,Problem Solving - Voltage source and Capacitor,Problem Solving - Voltage source, Current source, and Capacitor,Problem Solving - Current sources and Capacitor,,Course Summary
+ Show all weeks

Prescribed Books

The following are the suggested books for the course:

William Hayt, Jack Kemerly, and Steven Durbin. Engineering Circuit Analysis. 8th ed. McGraw Hill Education Pvt. Ltd: Mc Graw Hill Education; August 2013. a. Chapters 1-5 b. Chapters 7-8

Digital Logic and Computer Design, M. Mano, 2004 a. Chapter 1

Horowitz P Hill W. The Art of Electronics. 2nd ed. Cambridge England: Cambridge University Press; 1989. Note: Laboratory manual will be provided for the SPICE Lab.

About the Instructors

Prof. Sankaran Aniruddhan
Associate Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering, IIT Madras

Dr Sankaran Aniruddhan is Associate Professor in the VLSI group of the department of Electrical Engineering at Indian Institute of Technology Madras. He obtained his B. Tech. degree in Electrical Engineering from IIT Madras in 2000, and Ph.D. degree from the University of Washington, Seattle in 2006. Between 2006 and 2011, he worked in the RF-Analog group at Qualcomm Inc., San Diego where he designed integrated circuits for Cellular RF applications. His research primarily focuses on CMOS RF Integrated Circuits for Wireless Communications.

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Prof. Boby George
Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering, IIT Madras

Dr. Boby George received the M. Tech. and Ph. D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from IIT Madras. He is a Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at IIT Madras. His research areas include Sensor Interface Electronics, Electric and Magnetic field Based Sensors and their Applications, Sensor Systems for Water Quality and Quantity Monitoring, and Biomedical Instrumentation. He also serves as Associate Editor for IEEE Sensors Journal, IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement, and IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics.

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Prof. Janakiraman Viraraghavan
Assistant Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering, IIT Madras

Prof. Janakiraman Viraraghavan is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering, IIT Madras and is part of the Integrated Circuits and Systems (iCS) group. His research interests include porting machine-learning algorithms on to hardware and statistical analysis in VLSI. He also has a keen interest in Microprocessors and Programming in general.

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Other courses by the same instructor: EE2103 - Digital System Design , - Humanities Elective , - Humanities Elective , - Humanities Elective , - Humanities Elective , - Humanities Elective , - Humanities Elective , - Humanities Elective and - Humanities Elective

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