Catalog Data:

105 Introduction to Electrical Engineering (3, Sp) Gateway to the majors in Electrical Engineering. An overview of modern electrical engineering: communications, computers, circuits, components, controls, electromagnetics, microelectronics; principles of commercial products such as FAX, modem, copier, CD-ROM, ATM networks. Prerequisite: Math 125

 

Textbooks:

The Digital Information Age, An Introduction to Electrical Engineering, Roman Kuc, Brooks/Cole Publishing Company, Pacific Grove, California, (1999).
Electrical Engineering Uncovered, Second Edition, Dick White and Roger Doering, Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, (2001).

 

Coordinators:

Armand R. Tanguay, Jr. Professor of Electrical Engineering-Electrophysics,
Materials Science, and Biomedical Engineering;
Neuroscience Graduate Program
Charles L. Weber, Professor of Electrical Engineering-Systems

Topics:

 

Course Outcomes:

The student will be able to:
1. Appreciate the key aspects of electrical engineering as a discipline, and in relation to other engineering and scientific disciplines.
2. Understand the basic operational aspects of engineering as a profession, including the importance of ethical conduct on the part of professional engineers, the necessity of good communication and teamwork skills, and the omnipresence of essential tradeoffs balancing technical with market (economic) issues.
3. Apply the basic concepts of information, coding, and cryptography to both contrived and real world examples of communications systems, including the quantitative evaluation of information content (entropy function) and the construction and interpretation of several common forms of error correction codes.
4. Compare and contrast the key features of basic analog and digital signals and their representations.
5. Describe the basic processes involved in information transmission in specific examples ranging from communication and computer systems through control systems.
6. Identify the key features of acoustical and electromagnetic signals in terms of their representation as sinusoidal signals, including amplitude, wavelength, frequency, propagation speed, and their basic inter-relationships.
7. Describe the operation of radio (AM, FM, SSB) and television transmission and reception; diagram the carrier and sideband signals transmitted for each in frequency space; and place the fundamental radio and television carriers within the electromagnetic spectrum.
8. Derive basic switching and routing solutions for common problems applicable to basic phone systems and the Internet.
9. Perform basic analog to digital conversions, and digital to analog conversions; identify and quantify the three fundamental aspects of sampling in time, sampling in amplitude, and coding.
10. Describe the storage of digital information on various electronic media, including, for example CD’s and DVD’s, including information representation, recording, storage, mastering, and production techniques; calculate the information storage capacity of a specific medium in terms of the fundamental physical storage density, the encoding scheme employed, and the potential addition of error correction codes.
11. Describe the basic structure of computers, including both hardware (e.g., communications buses, CPU, memory, and peripheral devices) and software (e.g., operating system, applications).
12. Quantitatively assess basic features of modern computers, including communications bus throughput, computational throughput, and memory requirements.
13. Appreciate the role of communications in computing, and of computing in communications
14. Describe the function and physical packaging of basic digital logic gates.
15. Analyze and evaluate basic DC and AC circuits, including currents, voltages, resistances, capacitances, and inductances of elements combined in series and in parallel, as well as exponential rise and fall times in basic RC circuits.
16. Appreciate the new skills involved in building and testing a simple hybrid analog/digital circuit (e.g., a multi-tone sound synthesizer).
17. Understand the fundamental principles and applications of physical electronics, including the difference between semiconductors and either metals or insulators, the basic operation of three-terminal transistors, and information transmission by means of light in optical fibers.
18. Appreciate the simplicities and complexities of semiconductor device fabrication, including sequential processing, the requirements for cleanliness, the economies of scale, and the cost of modern seminconductor fabrication facilities.

Laboratory Project:

One laboratory project involving the construction, troubleshooting, testing, and experimentation with a multi-tone sound synthesizer circuit, and including a laboratory report.

 

One group project involving the taking of course notes for one lecture during the semester, multiple meetings to compare and contrast the notes taken by each of the three students within a group, and the compilation of an integrated set of notes for publication to the course web site.

 

Prepared by: Charles L. Weber and Armand R. Tanguay Jr. Date: 17 April, 2003