Electrical Engineering

The course is a study of imperative stored program control architecture and application in an embedded environment. An initial series of exercises teaching principles and techniques is followed by two application project phases. The students use C programming language as an example only to program an embedded processor built on a high performance Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) platform. There is no need for prior knowledge of the C language as students are provided with pre-built modules and guidelines for integration.

This course gives students an intuitive feel for the basic building blocks of analogue circuits. This course also teaches students how to analyze and design discrete and integrated CMOS based analogue circuits. Topics include MOS transistor model, linear and saturation regions, dc equations, MOS capacitances; small signal equivalent circuits and analysis; CMOS current mirrors, simple and cascode inverters, source follower plus differential amplifier circuits; differential amplifier circuits with gain and bandwith of simple amplifiers; and use of LTSPICE for circuit simulation. (The course builds on material presented in the second year.) 

This course provides students with an in-depth understanding of electronic device operation as well as the fabrication techniques used in their manufacture, and it introduces students to the design and manufacture of electronic products and the importance of quality control and design for manufacture. It covers the basics of semiconductor physics, the important building blocks of the p-n junction and MOS capacitor, and the operation and fabrication of MOS and bipolar transistors. Students are also introduced to electronics industry relevant materials relating to product design and manufacture as well as the important developments that are driving future technologies.

This course introduces the basic principles and hardware structures of a modern programmable computer. Students will explore computer architecture as the science and art of selecting and interconnecting hardware components to create a computer that meets functional, performance and cost goals. 

 Students will learn how to design the control and datapath for a pipelined RISC processor and how to design fast memory and storage systems. The principles presented in lecture are reinforced in the laboratory through design and simulation of a register transfer (RT) implementation of a RISC processor pipeline in Verilog.