Preface to the first edition

Summary

This book is an introduction to electronic circuits for first and second year engineering students at universities, polytechnics and colleges of technology. For specialist electrical engineering students the level of presentation is designed to be suitable for a first year course. For those not specialising in electronics it should provide a complete course in electronic circuits for their first degree. Some parts of the book, such as the chapters on integrated circuit operational amplifiers and advanced circuits, should also be of use to practising engineers and scientists.

A pre-requisite to understanding this book is a course of lectures on passive circuit analysis which should include DC and AC circuits, use of mesh and nodal analysis, the superposition theorem and the propositions of Kirchhoff, Thévenin and Norton. An appendix has been included to explain the fundamental concepts of semiconductors which are needed to understand the operation of active semiconductor devices.

The approach used in this book follows our own experience in teaching a course on electronic circuits to first year engineering students at Cambridge University. The course was re-structured at the start of a new engineering degree and using the results of three years of development and experience, this book has been written. A special feature is that, in chapter 1, a discussion of the general principles of signal handling in electronic circuits, such as gain, input and output impedance, frequency response and coupling of networks, precedes the descriptions of circuits using active devices.