Physics 123: Laboratory Electronics

Physics 123 has been making the design and analysis of electronic circuits as easy as “one-two-three” for over forty years. The course was started in 1974 by Paul Horowitz, who together with Winfield Hill, wrote the seminal text in circuit design, “The Art of Electronics”, based on his notes for the course. The course has evolved somewhat over the years, but it retains Horowitz and Hill’s core philosophy, that electronics is “a simple art, a combination of some basic laws, rules of thumb, and a large bag of tricks” (preface, 1st ed).

The course surveys practical electronics, with half of the course given to analog and digital circuits, respectively. The analog half of the course moves quickly from fundamentals (resistors, capacitors, diodes, inductors) to design with transistors, bipolar and field-effect, and then to the many applications of feedback, using operational amplifiers. The digital half of the course looks briefly at discrete-gate design, then at analog-digital interfacing, and culminates in the construction of a breadboard microcomputer.

In its aim to give students the tools and experience needed to be successful designers of electronic circuits, the course moves very quickly. The summer version of the course is particularly challenging because new material is introduced nearly every day. Most days consist of a seminar-style lecture followed by an extended laboratory session. The lab sessions are the centerpiece of the course, where students develop hands-on fabrication and debugging skills and put the “Art of Electronics” into practice.

I managed and taught the course in Summer 2019 after being a teaching assistant in Summer 2017 and Spring 2018.

Lecture notes