A Solid State Materials And Devices Course For Sophomore Electrical Engineering Students

This paper describes a new engineering course on electronic materials and devices offered to second-year electrical engineering students. The course covers the basic concepts of quantum mechanics, electrons, atoms, solid-state materials and related devices. The emphasis is placed on the properties of semiconductors and optoelectronic devices such as photodiodes, solar cells and thin film transistors. In most universities, this type of course is offered to third-year or higher students. We believe that there are great advantages to offering this course to second-year students. The students are introduced to a set of key knowledge in modern engineering and the course promotes a greater level of interest in electrical engineering before the students are officially admitted to the School of Engineering. The main challenge in offering this course to sophomore students is to achieve a balance between mathematical theory and experiential learning. Real-life examples and laboratory activities were designed to provide the students with hands-on experiences and to enforce the understanding of theoretical materials. The paper describes in detail how the course concepts were organized and instructed, examples of the lab activities developed, and evaluation data on two pilot offerings of the course.