Quite frankly it's a horrible course. I was hoping to get through it to get to more interesting subjects. This course has no marks of the consistency and beauty of the previous ones.

Prof. Erickson teaches control theory using a very outdated approach and using a very non-intuitive approach and he brands it all "design-oriented thinking". Well if I was designing circuits using this approach, I'd be unemployed by now. He highlights that pages long algebraic derivations are prone to errors, which is very true, but he's not gonna teach modern numerical methods using Matlab, Octave, which is standard practice in today's graduate control theory courses. Instead he goes on to pushing his brand mark equivalent circuit modelling, with even more error-prone circuit manipulations, and then finishing it off with a ruler and semilog paper based drawing approach, where each drawing takes 30m+! And don't get me started on the absurdity of the "canonical model" they're pushing with "s" Laplace operator variables all over your circuit. And he says these fast and reasonably accurate approximations are useful to give a quick intuitive feel for the design engineer about the most important parameters. Then in the homework assignments they expect 0.1% accurate calculation using these admittedly inaccurate approximations. On EDx, in many MIT courses, they actually do support design thinking, and let you choose any path in solving a problem as long it does the job and meets the specs. Here you're forced to one single "correct" solution, while in designing actual control circuits there is very seldom one "correct" solution.

The homeworks are also generally sloppy, week4 part 1 actually has a misleading instruction (oh a forward converter's model is essentially that of a buck converter plus a factor equal to the turn ratio), well that made me waste 6 hours before I realized that was not true. Quite outrageous waste of time considering you're paying hard cash, while trying to balance having a job, a family, and a small boy. And this course has been running with this error for years and nobody could be bothered to fix it. The discussion forum is routinely filled with people giving up on the their certificate right on the last week because of this.

Other than the problems above, the entire approach is quite outdated. He only makes one rushed remark of state-space control that basically it gives you the same thing... Well, it does, but for a fraction of the pain. Just look at the stats how many people believe this course will advance their careers... Let me be frank with you; you're never gonna use this in real life.

simply the best...

i would love to have more courses pertaining to various IC design topics such as data converters , PLL etc

Looking forward for Colorado University

Excellent course..very inspiring professors...Thank you Prof. Erickson, Prof. Maksimovic, Prof. Afridi...Looking forward for courses on resonant converters...

The course made me loose the forest for the trees. The next course Advanced Converter Control relied heavily on this course. Even though I got a 100% grade on this course, I couldn't map its teachings to the next course which basically required the application of Converter Control techniques.

The method of presenting concepts is not streamlined in this course. It is often the case that while discussing a main concept, the course branches off to some secondary concept and ends up spending majority time there. The over all impression one gets is that the secondary concept is the main concept and this leads to confusing the bigger picture.

If only engineering instruction could be made more intuitive, life would be much easier.

Having said the above, I am immensely helpful that the instructor presented this material in an online platform. Yes, I found the content confusing and frustrating, but it made me aware of field of converter control and its main components. Had this course not being offered online, I would never had the chance to learn about converter control. For this, I am indebt to the instructor. Thank you!

I have used classical control techniques earlier but could never have thought the way it has been taught here... A whole new approach has been taken up to design the controller for converters in an extremely simple manner... The approximations taken up not only provide a close answer to the actual solution but also change the way a gives a better visualisation for the frequency design...

This is the important part of converters to learn.It shows how much complex the systems will be and shows how can we minimize complexity by taking approximations.

Very nicely designed course, Started from basics without skipping any topic with very nice explanation. Recommended for every power electronics engineer.

This is a great course to get a basic foundation of bode plot techniques and fundamental control theory in relation to power converter design.

I spent enormous amount of time figuring out some assignment questions. Hope the idea of these practices makes sense in the industry.

Great material however discussion forums is dead (despite hundreds of views), mentors are unresponsive to questions

Great content.

Need more exercises, and solution to homeworks (eventually).

A very insightful generic control course for power electronics people.

It first teaches essential knowledge such as small-signal average modeling of power converters (buck, boost, buck-boost), basic bode plot knowledge (zeros, pole, drawing techniques of the plot), and transfer function of the converter. With those knowledge obtained, the design of the feedback control of the power converters is explained.

The slides are concise and easy-to-follow, the lecturer has a very good pace of presenting, and most importantly, many practical examples are given and solved step-by-step during the teaching, which are nice supplement for the newbies to get the basic understanding.

There is also some room to improve regarding the assignments. In the whole online learning process, It becomes really hard when there is one question you get stuck with. Even though there is a forum for posting discussion and questions, but there is no moderator or official help that can give a tip. Moreover, it is definitely not easy to discuss something that involves equations in the online forum. Therefore, some more additional material, video, tips, or from time to time, some active moderators in the online forum to help out some stuck people, would be nice.

Reviewing all courses in the specialization: Those courses are very informative. Practice problems are real converter circuit problems compared to some other courses on coursera which use cheesable multiple-choice questions. You can get 100% using only knowledge taught in the course. Some questions can be challenging. Also, the precision requirement of some numeric answers is high. But you can usually find hints in the discussion forums. Although professor did a great job of explaining things, the density of information conveyed is high for me because I have not seen circuits and electromagnism for a few years. I find myself often going back to rewatch some parts of the videos several times before getting the ideas. I think the estimated time for completion (the number of hours, not the number of weeks) is an underestimate if you start with little experience and want to understand the knowledge of the course and get all assignment questions correct.

The course content is well explained. I do not have electronics engineering background, but it was easy enough to follow the professor and complete the homeworks. I am doing this course, because it is free for me and I would like to get some insights into electronics engineering. So, I truly believe, people with electronics background can do faster than me. I was completing 2-3 weeks of course content and homework per week, so it took me about 4-5 weeks to complete first 3 modules of the course and now aiming to start the last module - magnetics. I am excited.

This course is an exellent career option for engineers desirous of being specialists in the design of controls systems for power electronics systems.

The course instructor has described the concepts by taking into consideration the various aspects of control systems design/analysis.

The quiz/assignments are set up such that they tend to increase the proficiency of a candidate.

OVERALL 10/10 for this course.

It's a great course! With a great professor! Strongly recommend to people who want to learn power electronics deeper! In this course, the professor discusses the dynamic characteristics of power converters in a fundamental way so that we can do the algebra by graph and gain valuable insights into the converter! It is an amazing methods for engineering design.

I would like to thank all members of the team who helped in this course especially proffesor Erickson for his great demostration and explainations. I have progressed in analysis and design for converter control and this course assisted me to progress with other courses in Modelling and control of power electronics specialization. Thank you

The course covers the fundamentals of small-signal a.c. modeling of dc-dc power converters and illustrates the complete design cycle of designing a control loop, to regulate the output voltage. The content is very well structured and explained with practical examples. It was a good learning experience.

Gives insight of regulator and practical op-amp compensator design. The concept build up from ac equivalent circuit modelling to bode plot review and finishing the regulator design with feedback loop, i saw the application of all concept and tools gathered from this course along with the previous ones.

The 3rd course in the specialization is more detailed and explained thoroughly. He has taken some extra lectures on Bode Plots as well, which is needed for the course. Tough quizzes, great assignments! And Dr. Robert Erickson is amazing as usual! A very helpful course in Power Electronics domain!