Course offered in:
Autumn 2020
Instructors:
Prof. Maryam Shojaei Baghini
Course Content:
The exact course content can be found on the department website. The course starts by using basic MOSFET physics to arrive at equations that will be used throughout, before developing a small signal model to make our lives easier. Then several basic amplifier configurations are covered, which serve as building blocks to come up with a complete working amplifier, covering relevant parameters and specifications along the way.
Prerequisites:
There are no strict prerequisites, but as with all PG courses, it helps if you have done a basic course, in particular, on analog circuits and device physics. Everything that you need will be covered again here, but will be done so in a revisory fashion. I do not know if sophomores were prohibited from taking the course, but it is definitely recommended that they wait until they have done some basic courses before this.
Feedback on Lectures:
Our primary source of material was the set of lectures by Prof. Ali Hajimiri of Caltech (available on YouTube). Before each lecture slot, we were given a list of lectures that we were expected to have watched in time for the slot, in which Prof. Maryam summarized the contents of the lecture with elaborations as needed, before moving on to answer doubts. The lectures themselves were fairly slow (this could be because most of the content was already familiar to us from the YouTube lectures), with several digressions whenever a question was asked.
Feedback on Tutorials, Assignments and Exams:
Tutorial sessions were conducted every two weeks to discuss a few problems related to the theory covered in the preceding lectures. These were extremely useful as they cleverly incorporated lots of subtle details. Assignment and exam problems were similar to the tutorial questions and were not very difficult. They mainly tested understanding and were fairly calculative.
Difficulty:
The course content is involved and will require effort to internalise. We also had to spend double the time in lectures since we had to watch lectures on YouTube and then attend live lectures. Assignments were lengthy but extremely helpful in understanding concepts, so considerable time was required to make the most of them. We also had a project that was, again, lengthy. Overall, the course is not easy, but can be done satisfactorily with moderate effort.
Grading Statistics:
Study Material and References:
Slides of lectures and tutorial sessions and recordings of lectures were made available. We were asked to watch lectures by Prof. Hajimiri (available on YouTube) as the primary instruction material. We were recommended to refer to “Design of Analog CMOS Integrated Circuits” by Behzad Razavi, which was a complete reference for this course.
Advanced courses that can be taken after this:
EE619 – RF Microelectronics Chip Design and EE719 – Mixed-Signal VLSI Design both have this a prerequisite (possibly not strict), and are natural extensions of various aspects covered in this course.
Takeaways from the course:
This course is essenitial for anyone who wishes to study analog or mixed signal design further. This will help in placements if one is applying for an analog profile.
Review by – Adway Girish (adwaygirish@gmail.com)
Department Academic Mentorship Program 