A New Introductory Laboratory Course for Electrical and Computer Engineering

A new Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) curriculum was recently adapted at North Carolina State University, ECE Department. In this curriculum, students choose their specialization areas starting from the second semester of the junior year. The system is carefully designed to ensure that students acquire both breadth and depth in their studies. The flagship of this curriculum is a new laboratory course, which the students take during the first semester after the first year common to all engineering students. The objectives of the new laboratory are: i) To introduce different ECE specialization areas to encourage students to start thinking about which specialization areas appeal more to them ii) To motivate the students through practical, hands-on experiments connected to real-life applications iii) To teach fundamental concepts and basic laboratory skills. In this laboratory, students learn to use standard ECE laboratory equipment including power supply, multimeter, function generator, and oscilloscope and spectrum analyzer. The laboratory relies on dedicated hardware in the form experiment boxes specifically designed for the laboratory. The dedicated hardware allows the students to perform experiments on advanced yet practical and exciting applications. To accompany the laboratory a textbook was written by representatives of different specialization areas in our department. In this paper, we present an overview of the course contents and the hardware developed for the laboratory. P ge 883.1 Proceedings of the 2003 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright © 2003, American Society for Engineering Education Introduction During the last three decades, the scope of electrical and computer engineering (ECE) has widened dramatically largely due to advances in digital technology and computers. The ECE educators responded to this continuous expansion by modifying their core courses and introducing new electives. In recent years however, it became clear that it would no longer be possible to maintain a modern ECE curriculum by adding a course or two when the need arrived. The changes prompted the ECE departments to consider innovative ideas in curricula design. The new curricula often included introductory courses, which were fundamentally different than traditional first courses on electric circuits. The new courses focused on ‘what’ to teach instead of ‘how’ to teach. In the following paragraphs, we provide examples from these new courses with brief descriptions of their objectives and contents. A sophomore level course was developed in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department of the Rice University1. Guided by the breadth-first principle, the new introductory course was designed to provide information on virtually all topics that the students would learn throughout their undergraduate education. The course was also intended to help the students understand what to expect from future advanced courses and eliminate the surprise factor. The course was designed as a two-semester sequence and included diverse concepts such as signals in time and frequency domains, modulation, A/D conversion, semiconductor devices and computer networking, which are definitely not included in traditional introductory circuits courses. The course was also supported by a hands-on laboratory, which emphasized tools such as the spectrum analyzer and distortion analyzer. Another similar course is a freshmen level course developed at Carnegie Mellon University2. The fundamental concept behind this course is to develop an intellectually stimulating laboratory course that can be taught during the first year by carefully selecting a set of topics that do not require any more than standard high school algebra and physics. This course too covered a broad range of ECE topics while providing fundamentals concepts such as Kirchoff’s laws and superposition. A third is a laboratory course developed at Penn State University3, which used components of a compact disc player to unify and motivate lecture topics and modular lab assignments throughout the semester. Similar to the examples given above, the course included non-linear circuit elements as well as higher level concepts such as amplification of signals and D/A conversion. Other examples of similar courses include those developed at University of Illinois4 and Santa Clara University5. The common thread between these new courses is a distinct departure from an introductory course on electric circuits limited to analysis of RLC circuits. Instead, the new courses span a wide range of topics with emphasis on experiments that connect the fundamental concepts to real life applications. In this paper, we present a similar course developed at North Carolina State University for Electrical and Computer Engineering sophomores. The course shares the fundamental philosophy P ge 883.2 Proceedings of the 2003 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright © 2003, American Society for Engineering Education of the courses described above. Application oriented experiments are used to introduce fundamental concepts while providing the students an overview of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Objectives and the Structure of the New Course A new Electrical and Computer Engineering curriculum was recently developed at North Carolina State University. In this curriculum, the students matriculate into the ECE department as sophomores after successfully completing the requirements of a first year common to all engineering students. The students continue taking core courses until the second semester of their junior year, when they begin choosing their electives from different specialization areas. The first step in the new curriculum is a new core course entitled ‘Introduction to Electrical and Computer Engineering Laboratory’ created by a team of eight faculty members from the ECE Department at North Carolina State University. The course was offered for the first time in fall 2000. Since then, we have been regularly teaching the course every semester including summer. The objectives of the course are: To provide an overview of ECE specialization areas to help students find topics that 1. excite them and choose their specialization areas accordingly. To motivate the students through innovative experiments connected to real-life 2. applications. To introduce fundamental concepts through hands-on experiments in a state-of-the-art 3. hardware laboratory. To provide fundamental skills for using standard measurement tools. 4. Throughout the course, the students are exposed to concepts such as analysis of signals in time and frequency domain, amplification of signals, modulation for RF transmission and reception, sampling and reconstruction, semiconductor devices, IC fabrication and logic gates, which are not included in traditional introductory level courses on “electric circuits”. In the laboratory, each lab station is equipped with a multimeter, a power supply, a function generator an oscilloscope and a desktop personal computer. The oscilloscope has the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) capability, which allows the students to display their signals in both time and frequency domains. The desktop computer serves a variety of functions, which include a) accessing the online course material such as recorded sounds of different musical instruments, b) generating high fidelity music signals using the internal CD player b) storing the oscilloscope displays to image files and c) creating the first drafts of the lab reports. Experiments rely on dedicated hardware designed and manufactured at North Carolina State University which allows the students to approach applications at a systems level. The hardware is designed to minimize experimental errors providing the students more time to focus on the P ge 883.3 Proceedings of the 2003 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright © 2003, American Society for Engineering Education concepts instead of broken or missing wires on their breadboards. The course consists of two seventy five minute lectures and a three hour laboratory every week. The hardware laboratory features eleven work stations. Each laboratory session can accommodate a maximum of twenty two students in groups of two. The lectures are given by the professors and the laboratory sessions are taught by graduate students. A new textbook was created realizing that it would be very difficult to adopt an existing text for the course. The chapters were written by faculty members representing different specialization areas. Chapters include step-by-step instructions to run the experiments. The first five chapters provide the foundation for future chapters. The remaining chapters introduce different specialization areas including electronic circuits, radio frequency communication, digital signal processing, solid-state electronics, digital circuits and computer networking. Laboratory Experiments and Dedicated Hardware The laboratory consists of ten experiments utilizing the dedicated hardware and two experiments based on computer simulations. A brief description of each chapter and its experiment is provided in the following paragraphs.