Projects With Applications To Wireless Communications An Innovative Approach To The Digital Design Course

Advances in wireless and broadband communications have been fueled by the advances in digital design, with more and more aspects of modern communications systems relying upon digital techniques. Digital design work by electrical and computer engineers is thus often applied to wireless and other communications systems. Efforts to make a junior-level undergraduate course in digital design more relevant to these applications resulted in the development of student digital design projects based both upon their relevance to communications topics and their suitability as undergraduate design projects within a digital design course. The projects selected included a direct digital synthesizer (DDS) and aspects of a digital delay-locked loop (DLL). Both projects offer an opportunity for a variety of approaches and the use of realistic constraints. Introduction The study of wireless and other advanced communications systems topics at the undergraduate level has developed at some universities, largely in response to the increased interest resulting from the impressive research and development in such technology over the past several years. The University of San Diego (USD) is located within a region that has emerged as one of the technical centers for the wireless communications industry, so student interest in wireless applications is high, even within a program that has only undergraduate students [1], [2]. The San Diego region benefits from the significant presence of many telecommunications companies doing interesting work. Advances in wireless and broadband communications have been fueled by the advances in digital design, as more and more aspects of modern communications systems can be based upon digital techniques. Since use of these techniques has become ubiquitous to the wireless and broadband industry, projects that are relevant to these areas of communication were developed for an undergraduate course in digital design. The projects to be described were initially developed within an undergraduate advanced digital design course and as independent student projects and were then adapted for use as a final project within a junior-level first course in digital design. As second-semester juniors, students are also completing a course in signals and systems that provides them some initial background in frequency-domain topics that are applicable. Beginning in Spring 2002, laboratories within the digital course were updated to make use of affordable and versatile programmable logic device boards produced by Digilent, Inc [DIGI]. Students were required to purchase the Digilab XCRP, featuring a Xilinx CoolRunner CPLD for P ge 9.026.1