Modern Electronics
The final part of the course brings together the disciplines that define 21st-century electronic engineering: the physical design of printed circuit boards, the embedded systems that animate them, and the advanced technologies — RF front-ends, billion-transistor VLSI chips, and photonic links — that connect the world. Part VII gives you the vocabulary and tools to move from a schematic to a shipped product.
What You'll Learn in Part VII
Apply IPC-2221 trace-width rules, compute controlled-impedance stackups, and implement EMC-clean layouts that pass compliance testing.
Program GPIO, serial buses, ADCs, and timers on Arduino and STM32 targets; manage concurrency with FreeRTOS tasks and semaphores.
Navigate Smith charts, analyse CMOS synthesis flows, trace Moore's law to FinFETs, and engineer fiber-optic links using Snell's law.
Chapter 19: PCB Design
Schematic capture, component footprints, layer stackups, trace width and impedance calculations, via types, design rules, thermal management, and EMC best practices.
Chapter 20: Microcontrollers
Harvard vs Von Neumann architectures, CPU cores, memory hierarchy (Flash/SRAM/EEPROM), peripherals (GPIO, UART, SPI, I2C, ADC, PWM, timers), interrupt handling, Arduino, ARM Cortex-M, STM32, and FreeRTOS.
Chapter 21: RF, VLSI & Photonics
RF front-ends (Smith chart, S-parameters, LNA, noise figure), VLSI design (Moore's law, CMOS, FinFET, standard cells, timing), and photonics (LEDs, laser diodes, photodetectors, fiber optics, optical communications).
Prerequisites
Parts I–VI of the Electronics course. Specific chapters assume familiarity with AC circuit analysis (Part I), transistor operation (Part II), op-amp design (Part III), digital logic (Part IV), filter theory (Part V), and switching power conversion (Part VI). Basic C programming experience is helpful for the microcontrollers chapter.