EEE 3300 Electronics I is the first course in electronic devices and circuits in the electrical engineering curriculum. It is the transition from circuit analysis — where every element is linear and the answer is a matter of solving equations — to electronics, where the central devices are non-linear, must be biased into a useful operating region, and are then analysed by linearising about that operating point. That two-step habit, bias the device, then analyse the small signal, is the intellectual core of the course and the thing students most often fail to internalise.
The Statewide Course Numbering System titles this course simply Electronics and describes it as covering “diode models and circuits; DC biasing of bipolar-junction and field-effect transistors; small- and large-signal transistor models; frequency analysis of single-stage AC amplifiers.” That description is precise and matches what the offering institutions teach.
Three Florida institutions carry EEE 3300: Florida A&M University and Florida State University, which share the joint FAMU–FSU College of Engineering, and Florida Atlantic University. All three title it Electronics I (FAU as Electronics 1) and all three carry it at 3 credits. The content is consistent across them.
⚠ This is a lecture course, and at FAMU and FSU it has a separate laboratory. EEE 3300 carries no C suffix and includes no laboratory hours of its own. FAMU and FSU pair it with EEE 3300L Electronics I Laboratory (1 credit), which is a separate registration and a separate grade. See the Special Information section — taking the lecture without the laboratory is a common and avoidable mistake.
.op operating-point listing is a specific skill this course should leave you with.At FAMU and FSU, EEE 3300 is a 3-credit lecture and EEE 3300L Electronics I Laboratory is a separate 1-credit course. They are taken together — FSU lists EEE 3300 as a co-requisite of the laboratory — but they are two enrolments and two grades. Three consequences follow:
Institutions elsewhere in Florida package equivalent material as an integrated C course — the University of Florida and the University of West Florida carry EEE 3308C / EEE 3308 Electronic Circuits I, and the University of Central Florida carries EEE 3307C Electronics I at 4 credits with a laboratory. These are different course numbers and do not articulate automatically; see below.
First-course electronics is taught at nearly every Florida engineering programme, under at least four different numbers:
SCNS equivalency does not cross course numbers. The material corresponds closely and departments approve substitutions routinely, but the substitution must be requested and is granted on the strength of a syllabus. Keep yours.
At FSU the prerequisite is EEL 3002L with a grade of C− or better, with MAP 2302 (differential equations) as a co-requisite, also C− or better; electrical engineering majors additionally need EEL 3111 (circuits) with a C− or better. Requirements differ at FAU — check your own catalog.
What matters more than the course list is the preparation it stands for: fluent linear circuit analysis (nodal and mesh analysis, Thévenin and Norton equivalents, phasors) and comfort with logarithms and decibels. Students who are still slow at finding a Thévenin equivalent will struggle, because in this course that step is assumed and happens inside a larger problem.
EEE 3300 sits in the junior year, after circuits and alongside or just after differential equations. It gates EEE 4301 Electronics II and its laboratory EEE 4301L, and it is the prerequisite for the FAMU–FSU device and integrated-circuit sequence: EEE 4313 (CMOS digital IC design), EEE 4330 (microelectronics engineering), EEE 4351 (solid-state electronic devices) and EEE 4450 (device modelling and simulation). It is one of the highest-leverage courses in the degree — a weak grade here narrows the elective options available for the next two years.
Electronics I has a reputation as one of the two or three hardest courses in the electrical engineering curriculum, and the reputation is earned. The difficulty is not the individual mathematics, which is mostly algebra; it is that each problem requires deciding which model applies before any calculation begins, and that decision is not automatable. Plan on ten to twelve hours a week outside class, and treat the laboratory as part of the learning rather than a formality — the gap between a hand-calculated bias point and a measured one is where the subject is actually understood.
SCNS records EEE 3300 as guaranteed to transfer to an institution offering the same course. Because only three Florida institutions carry this number, the practical reach of that guarantee is limited — but the three that do carry it teach it consistently, so transfer among FAMU, FSU and FAU is straightforward. The course is upper-division and carries no general-education or Gordon Rule designation.
The NCEES Fundamentals of Engineering (Electrical and Computer) exam includes an Electronics topic area covering semiconductor materials, diodes, transistors (BJT and FET), amplifier biasing and small-signal analysis, and operational amplifiers. This course covers the majority of it directly, and Electronics II covers the remainder. Students planning to sit the FE should keep the Sedra and Smith summary tables of small-signal parameters — they are close to what the FE reference handbook provides.
Analog circuit design is one of the areas where AI assistance is least reliable, and understanding why is genuinely useful to a student in this course.
Where it helps. Large language models are good at explaining a concept a textbook has stated tersely — why the Miller effect multiplies Cμ, what channel-length modulation physically represents — and at generating and debugging SPICE netlists, interpreting simulator error messages, and producing plotting or parameter-sweep scripts. Used as an explainer and a scripting aid, they save real time.
⚠ Where they fail, and why it coincides with this course’s subject. The characteristic error of an AI tool asked an electronics question is to apply a small-signal formula without first checking the operating point — producing a gain figure for a transistor that is, on the given bias network, in saturation or cut-off and therefore not amplifying at all. That is precisely the error this course exists to eliminate. The discipline being taught is: establish the region of operation first, then linearise. A model that pattern-matches on “common-emitter amplifier” and returns −gmRC has skipped exactly the step that distinguishes an engineer from a formula.
Two further failure modes are worth naming. Models routinely produce SPICE netlists that simulate but describe a different circuit than the one asked for — a missing ground reference or a misplaced node number produces a clean-looking result for the wrong topology. And they will confidently quote device parameters (β, VT, Kn) that do not match the datasheet for the part named, which matters because β varies by a factor of three across devices of the same part number — a fact this course teaches you to design around and which a generated answer will quietly ignore.
The engineer’s responsibility. A bias point can be checked by hand in two minutes and by simulation in one. Neither the tool nor the textbook signs the design; the engineer does. The habit worth forming in this course is to treat any generated answer as a hypothesis to be tested against a DC operating-point analysis before it is believed.
Academic integrity. FAMU, FSU and FAU each maintain academic honour policies that cover AI-generated work, and instructors within a department differ in what they permit. Hand analysis is normally expected to be your own even where simulation assistance is allowed. Ask before you rely on a tool, and disclose its use where required.
Generated September 9, 2026 · Updated September 9, 2026