Deriving Closed Formula Design Restrictions in Electronics Labs

The Electronics circuit design course is a required course for undergraduate Electrical Engineering students.The course covers oscillator circuits based on Schmitt trigger comparators with the hysteresis effect and multivibrators such as the 555 Timer circuits.The course introduces students to applications, such as timers and frequency dividers.The course is offered as a 3-credit course.Two credits are for lecture and one credit for lab.As part of lab assignments, students need to come up with closed formulas for the output signal and design restrictions.The objective of this step is to assess how well they understand the circuit's concept of operation.It challenges their creative thinking and develops their insightful analysis skills.The goal is also to help them formulate the design limitations and rules in a reusable format.The obtained design is tested in PSpice simulation, and the formula is presented using MATLAB animation to see the effect of changing different design parameters on the output signal.As a final step, the circuit is built and tested.Thorough investigation of the theoretical design limitations helps in getting better hardware implementation designs.Being able to precisely explain circuit designs and define design restrictions and specifications is an important proficiency for practicing engineers.This paper shares lab designs and results that can be used in Electronics labs to strengthen the fundamentals of circuit design and analysis.Vx Vy Vo Non-inverting Schmitt Trigger Comparator