5.2. Analog Electronics

Although this is a course on digital signal processing this section gives a short introduction to analog electronics:

  1. to illustrate that signal processing is certainly not something that can only be done with a computer, and

  2. in fact many (if not most) applications in signal processing deal with signals that are obtained by sampling a continuous time signal in the ‘real world’, and

  3. in fact many applications in signal processing end up outputting some signal in analog form (e.g. the sound signal to drive a loudspeaker, or the current to drive the motor for a robot), and

  4. to illustrate the use of complex impedances and corresponding frequency responses, and

  5. to get acquinted with decibels, and

  6. to practice making Bode plots,

  7. and to show that in some areas of computer science some knowledge of physics/electronics comes in very handy.

We start with some concepts that you will have seen when taking physics classes at high school: elementary electronics. Then we introduce the electronic components that are dependent on the use of alternating currents and voltages. The voltage then varies as a function of time, it is a signal.

This short tutorial chapter on analog electronics ows a lot to the website https://www.electronics-tutorials.ws/ and some figures are used. Another great source is the CMU course on analog electronics at https://course.ece.cmu.edu/~ee321/. (e.g. I like the slides of lecture 4 on the opamp).

If you have a (theoretical) physics background then you will know that all of electricity and magnetism is described using just the 4 Maxwell equations. The abstractions needed to get from the theoretical model based on Maxwell equations to the down to earth Kirchhoff laws is beautifully explained by prof. Agarwall in the MIT course 6.002 in the first lecture.