Analog Electronics: Circuits, Systems and Signal Processing

Book Preface

This book is written primarily as a course text for the earUer parts of undergraduate courses, BS courses in the USA and both CEng and lEng courses in the UK. It covers those topics of analog electronics that we consider essential for students of Electrical, Electronic, Communication, Instrumentation, Control, Computer and allied engineering discipHnes. Naturally, we recognize that this is the age of digital electronics, but we are also aware of the importance of analog circuitry and concepts in the spectrum of skills essential for the proper education of engineers in the ‘hght-current’ field. We know that the majority of the topics in this book are covered in all good engineering programmes. They may be contained in syllabuses with the word ‘analog’ in their titles, but many are equally at home in others. The book may be used to form the basis of a full subject, course, module or unit or selectively across a number of these and also at several levels.

Our aim is to provide a coverage which is as rigorous as possible whilst ensuring that the engineering dimension is not lost in a mass of dry analysis. We try to bring the subject alive by relating it to the everyday experience of the students. The distinction is made between exact solutions, approximations and ‘rules of thumb’. Exact analysis is given whenever it is appropriate, bearing in mind the purpose and intended readership of this book, even where approximations and ‘rules of thumb’ are used subsequently. We aim to provide a sufficiently comprehensive List of the types of system, circuit and device, in order to acquaint students with the full range of possible solutions. Students need not be asked to be equally familiar with them all.
Each chapter has a selection of self-assessment questions (SAQs) inserted at appropriate points in the text, to allow the reader to check that the preceding material has been understood, and can be applied to the solution of part of a realistic design problem. Answers to these SAQs are given at the end of the book. Parts of the analysis are illustrated by computer simulations, which the reader is encouraged to perform. These use two types of software: spreadsheets and SPICE-derivative analog circuit analysis packages. For the spreadsheets, the registered reader can download the contents from the publisher’s website, and load them into Microsoft Excel, or a compatible program, running on a PC or a Macintosh. In the case of the circuit analysis software, few of even the SPICE look-alikes are compatible, so we ask the reader to draw the circuit schematic, or enter the netlist, on whichever package is available.