What you'll learn

Structure of atoms

Conductors, insulators, semiconductors

Doping, n-type,p-type

Making switches from semiconductors

Transistors

Diodes

Requirements

No requirement

Description

We start from atoms at the most fundamental level and explain what its made of, and how we distinguish them from one another, and work our way up in creating transistors as switches from atoms, and logic gates from transistors and computers from logic gates.The best way to understand anything is to use as few abstraction as possible, thats why our lowest abstraction is atom. Then we explain what atom is made of, and we distinguish atoms from the number of protons that they have.Then we introduce silicon atoms, and explain why its important for us, and how we create switches from it.In general we could say this course could be categorized in 2 sections, one is, how to create an electronically controllable switch from atoms and second, how to create computers from switches, or how to create a universal logic gate from the electronic switch.But the important thing that makes this course different from the others, is that we don't take anything for granted. Meaning at each turn we explain a concept and after understanding that concept we define the abstraction ourselves. As an example we carry out some experiments and based on the results of that experiment we would create abstractions and move on to the next topic.

Overview

Section 1: Introduction

Lecture 1 Building blocks of the Universe

Lecture 2 How to approach this course

Lecture 3 From atoms to electric field

Lecture 4 Gravitational field and Electric field

Lecture 5 Conductors, insulators, semiconductors

Lecture 6 Electronegativity, ionic and covalent bonds

Lecture 7 Silicon and semiconductors

Lecture 8 Ohms law from a physics perspective

Lecture 9 Electrons and holes-free charges in silicon

Lecture 10 Doping-n-type and p-type

Lecture 11 Pn junction diode

Lecture 12 Capacitors

Lecture 13 Pn junction in reverse bias

Lecture 14 Pn junction in forward bias

Lecture 15 Transistors as switches

Lecture 16 Creating gates using transistors-creating computers using gates

Anyone who wants to understand computer from fundamental concepts in an intuitive way