List of Free Microelectronics Courses and Classes
See our list of the top free online microelectronics courses. Learn about what courses are available and what topics they cover to find the course that's right for you.
Take Free Courses. Earn Real College Credit.
Most free courses don't lead to college credit. Education-Portal.com's free courses do!
Here's how it works:
Online Microelectronics Course Information
Microelectronics courses, both traditional campus-based as well as free online ones, are commonly found within electrical engineering programs. Many of the courses described below include most of the content of actual credit-bearing classes for enrolled students, but none of these institutions award academic credit to users of their free online materials. Some of these resources include written lecture notes, while others provide video recordings of lectures.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
MIT's free courses often include lecture notes, homework assignments, and exams students can use to self-assess. Circuits and Electronics is an introductory course to all of electrical engineering. Students will learn about circuit abstraction, switches and MOS (metal oxide semiconductor) transistors, energy storage elements and more. The course includes video lectures, exams, assignments and labs. (One lecture from the original course is not available as a video.) It provides the link for free online supplements to the recommended textbook. OpenCourseWare users can join an online 'study group' forum to interact with each other.
Microelectronic Devices and Circuits teaches undergraduate students about the modeling of microelectronics, circuit designs, electrical behavior of microelectronics and more. The course materials include 25 PDFs of lecture notes, along with 13 sets of supplementary notes. There are also ten assignments and some design project materials. Three years' variants of the three exams are available, including solution sets for several of these. Integrated Microelectronics Devices is a graduate-level course that explains semiconductor structures, MOS field-effect transistor and bipolar junction transistor. This course includes 39 separate lecture notes, nine homework assignments and four exams.
Open University
Users can download and print the lectures for this resource, which is a unit from the larger online course 'Engineering Small Worlds: Micro and Nano Technologies.' Structural Devices teaches students how physical dimensions and material properties are related to particular behaviors and how different forces are relevant at small scales. It covers available etching methods and their characteristics, among other concepts. Divided into eight topics, the course provides a series of brief written lectures with visual aids and examples.
University of California-Berkeley
- Introduction to Microelectronic Circuits
- Microelectronics Devices and Circuits
- Digital Integrated Circuits
- Introduction to MEMS Design
These UC-Berkeley online courses consist of video/audio lectures (recordings of actual campus-based class sessions) ranging from 1-2 hours. The available online videos may not provide the full content of the original course. The Introduction to Microelectronic Circuits course, meant for lower-division undergraduate students, covers circuit design, components and diagram conventions. Later lectures address Boolean logic and sequential circuits. This class has lectures of 45-50 minutes; 36 lectures are included out of a 38-lecture sequence.
The Microelectronics Devices and Circuits course, for upper-level undergraduates, covers topics like frequency response, p-n junction diodes, small-signal analysis and more. It offers 21 lectures out of 25, ranging from about 45 to about 80 minutes. Digital Integrated Circuits teaches engineering students to understand and model circuits, in order to design and build a successful circuit that meets a particular project's needs. The 27 available class videos for this upper-division undergrad course are typically 80 minutes, with a few 1-hour videos.
Introduction to MEMS Design is a graduate-level course about microelectromechanical systems, addressing commercial applications as well as current research. It's intended to suit a broad audience, with material drawn from multiple engineering disciplines. Some videos last for 80 minutes, while others are 2 hours long. UC Berkeley began posting the recordings from its ongoing Fall 2012 class; prior years' videos may be found on YouTube.
Earn Real Credit from Free Courses
While the free courses above don't award credit directly, you can earn credit by passing an exam and transferring credit to your college. There are two widely recognized and affordable options for exams that award credit.
Option #1: CLEP Exams
The College Board's 33 CLEP exams allow you to test out of your general education requirements. Credit is accepted at 2/3 of colleges and universities in the U.S.
Option #2: Excelsior College's Credit-by-Exam
Excelsior College offers over 40 exams that lead to transferable credit. You can also earn three full degrees by taking free online courses and earning your credit by exam.
Learn how Education Portal Academy will pay you to earn credit!
Do you like this post?
Yes NoGet our best student money savers and free resources


Our Commitment