Analog Electronics Stream

Electronics studies how networks of semiconductor devices such as transistors perform signal processing tasks. Examples of such tasks include generating and amplifying speech or music, TV broadcasting and displaying, cell phone and satellite communications. Students learn how to design sophisticated electronic microchips to perform these tasks in a variety of electronic systems.

The analog nature of electronic signals is of importance as the real world is analog and because in modern microchips even digital circuits exhibit analog behaviors. Examples of engineering problems in analog electronics are: how to efficiently represent an analog signal such as an image recorded by a digital camera in a digital format so that it can be stored in a digital memory or processed by a microprocessor; how to send large amounts of information such as high-definition video data from one microchip to another quickly; how to send data such as a text message to a cell phone wirelessly in the presence of interference; and how to design a pacemaker or neural implant to function inside a human body.