This autumn, I have to conduct with students of a new IT specialty a series of lab exercises related to study of basic semiconductor devices: ordinary, zener, light, tunnel and other diodes, bipolar and FET transistors, diode and transistor circuits... So, I temporarily leave the “kingdom” of my favorite analog circuitry where I deal with circuit systems and move to the lower level where I will reveal and show the secrets of circuit components. The problem that stands before me is how to do this in the best way...

I have unpleasant memories of the way they conducted laboratory exercises in this discipline in the 80's, when I studied in the same university. I remember that I had to perform a series of programmed actions on ready-made laboratory setups enclosed in boxes so their internal structure remained hidden for me...

That is why, I decided to conduct more interesting laboratory exercises with my students where they can conduct free experiments on flexible prototyping boards by all sorts of components instead of hard prepared experiments on closed laboratory setups. Thus I hope to motivate them by waking their curiosity and creativity.

My idea is first to pose the problem on the whiteboard, then to find the possible solutions and finally, to implement experiments in various ways. Students can investigate IV curves of diodes and transistors at four levels:

  • manually - driving the circuit by a potentiometer and measuring the electrical quantities by digital multimeters or a digital oscilloscope in XY mode (shown in the first attached picture below)
  • semiautomatically - driving the circuit by a functional generator or simply by a 50 Hz transformer, and measuring the quantities by an analog oscilloscope in XY mode (the second picture)
  • automatically - by a data acquisition board equipped by an appropriate periphery (the third picture)

It would be interesting for me to know your opinion about such an educational experiment. Whether it would be feasible or would be extremely difficult for students and, as a consequence, for me?

See also:

https://www.researchgate.net/post/How_do_students_investigate_semiconductor_devices_in_the_lab-manually_or_automatically

https://www.researchgate.net/post/How_do_we_investigate_the_IV_curve_of_a_forward_biased_diode-by_current_voltage_or_real_source

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