The ECE 211 Laboratory: an Overview

Welcome to the laboratory portion of ECE 211! In this lab we hope you will broaden your experience of electrical engineering, taking it out of the textbooks and homework problems and into two new worlds:

· The real world of wires and devices and measurement tools, where electrical things really happen (they flash on and off, they buzz, they burn up!) – this is the Circuits Lab; and

· The world of circuit simulation, where through powerful software tools you can discover how electrical and electronic circuits work while you sit at a keyboard, performing simulated experiments which may, but might not, be physically possible – this is the PC Lab.

In the Circuits Lab you will be wiring up circuits which will test your understanding of the underlying theory, and you will become proficient at using equipment which is universal in circuits labs – the digital multimeter (DMM), the signal generator (also called a function generator), and the oscilloscope (also called the “scope” for short). Because your circuits will certainly not all work the first time you try them, you will also learn debugging techniques to fix circuits which don’t behave the way you expect and want them to. You will get hands-on experience with TTL and CMOS digital devices, with diodes and transistors, and with the MOSFETs which are used extensively in the course text. We hope that these experiments will be fun and motivating, and that you will want to go home and experiment further with your kits.

In the PC Lab you will be using PSpice, a very powerful software tool for circuit simulation and analysis. PSpice is used widely in industry, so you will be learning a marketable skill as well as having fun with this remarkable tool. You will be amazed at the ease with which you will be able to construct “virtual” circuits, once you get the hang of it (not hard!) and amazed also at the power of the program to display simulation results as high-quality graphs. It will be interesting to use PSpice to do things which cannot be done in a physical lab, for example putting some bizarre input into a circuit, or to use Probe – the graphical companion program - to display graphs which a normal scope cannot.. PSpice will certainly be useful in courses other than this one since its power far exceeds the needs of this course. You may even find it tempting to use PSpice to “work” the experiments in the Circuits Lab, or to check (but not do!) your homework.

Although these labs will reinforce things you learn in the lecture and from the textbook, they will not be constrained to “follow the book.” That is, sometimes in the labs you will be using devices and techniques which are in the book but months in your future, or which are not in the book at all. If it were not so, the lab could not be nearly as interesting. This means that you will have to do a little digging yourself – reading ahead in the book, looking in other books, hunting on the web for help, or whatever – from time to time. For example, diodes don’t appear until practically the end of the textbook – we can’t wait that long to use them. Some of the items – digital devices in particular – you will probably learn about in other courses you are taking. But don’t worry, in the lab writeups we will provide enough information for you to use the devices, even if you have to wait until later to understand them.

The Circuits Lab and the PC Lab will not necessarily stay “in sync” since each lab has its own strong points and can investigate matters that the other cannot. For example, there is no “speaker” in PSpice which can let you actually listen to the output of a bandpass filter, and there is no scope in the Circuits Lab which can display a trace of the power used in a circuit.

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