A Freshman Advising Seminar On Digital Electronics And Chip Design

This paper describes a novel freshman advising seminar on digital electronics and chip design that has been taught at Harvey Mudd College for three semesters. The seminar seeks to combine the freshman advising process with a hands-on opportunity for freshmen to see what engineers “really do.” In this seminar, the advisor, six to eight freshman advisees, and a student associate advisor / lab assistant meet one evening a week. In the first five weeks, students learn to solder together a utility board and breadboard a series of combinational and sequential digital electronics projects. Once they are comfortable with the design of digital circuits, they learn about building logic gates from Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) CMOS transistors and laying out CMOS transistors. They use the Electric CAD tool to design schematics, layout their circuits, simulate, and verify the chip as a team before sending it to the MOSIS service for fabrication. The chips have been used as components in industry sponsored research projects carried out by senior engineering students. Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) design historically has been offered at the graduate or senior level, but has been simplified to the point that freshmen can develop working chips in the time available. This paper presents the structure of the seminar and assesses its benefits, including closer contact between advisor and advisees and the tremendous enthusiasm it generates among the freshmen. Based on success of the pilot project, a number of other freshman seminars have been developed and taught at Harvey Mudd College.