Catalog Course Description
Design principles and a variety of realistic constraints such as economic factors, safety, reliability, aesthetics, ethics, and social impact; design project organization and design goals; techniques for making oral presentations and organizing written reports; interviewing and resume writing skills along with the art of making a favorable first impression. Prereq., This course must be taken the semester before ECE 4899.
Prerequisite: Semester before final semester.
Offered: Fall and Spring
Course Syllabus as of 09:52 PM on Monday, January 14, 2013.
Lecture Notes PDF as of 09:57 AM on Tuesday, January 15, 2013.
Lecture Notes Folder
Fall 2012 Lectures as Streaming QuickTime Movies
You will need to have the free QuickTime player installed on your PC or Mac (get it). If clicking the link below does not start your QuickTime player you can manually start QuickTime, then the 'Choose File -> Open URL' menu item and enter the URL pointed to by the below links. The URL's are of the form rtsp://streaming.uccs.edu/mwickert/ece4890/ Lecture#.mov, where # is 1, 2, ... Right clicking over the links should give you the option of copying the URL. The .mov file is in a high resolution 1280 x 768 format at 8 frames per second. The typical file size per lecture is about 300 MB.
To directly download the lectures for playback at a later time, go to the lectures folder, right click, and download
Team assignments for topics A, B, & C as of 08:06 AM on Thursday, February 14, 2013.
Team topic evaluation forms as of 10:47 AM on Friday, February 22, 2013 .
Slides from topic talks Spring 2013.
Spring 2013 Design Project RFP's as of 03:23 PM on Saturday, March 23, 2013
More project RFPs will be added as they become available. If you have a local contact that would like to sponsor a project, perhaps your team project, let me know. As a starting point you can bring them to this site to view the current RFP list to get an idea of project topics and typical project scope.
Sample Power Point Presentation as of 10:20 AM on Thursday, April 28, 2011.
Friday May 3 Pre-Proposal Presentation Schedule as of 07:34 AM on Sunday, April 28, 2013
Pre-proposal evaluation forms as of 08:37 AM on Wednesday, May 01, 2013
PCB design process slide sheets as of 04:28 PM on Wednesday, March 17, 2010. The full ppt file as of 04:28 PM on Wednesday, March 17, 2010.
Link to lecture video folder (sp10 version). The LPKF PCB router training video is also located here.
Download Design Spark, a full-featured and free PCB design tool. The newest version, version 3.0, also supports links from Spice simulation tools such as LT-Spice.
Download the free version of the Gerber file viewer ViewMate.
Download the free version of Eagle.
- Advanced Circuits DRC file for Eagle. Place the unzipped file in the dru folder of your Eagle install.
- Advanced Circuits CAM file for Eagle. Place the unzipped file in the cam folder of your Eagle install.
- Eagle training videos
Analog Discovery This gives you two scope channels, two function generator channels, full logic analyzer, pattern gernerator, and static I/O, and more for $99.
A USB-based logic analyzer logic or logic16, including protocol analysis. The software runs on PC, Mac, and Linux.
The National Instruments myDAQ. This gives you soft instruments for working at home on your own notebook PC.
Breakout boards from proto-advantage for breadboarding fine pitch IC packages. 10:20 AM on Thursday, April 28, 2011.
Case Study Speakers
Case Study Fall 2011
Ms. Linda Cash, MSEE: Sat-ID
Case Study Spring 2011
William Sward, MSEE: RF Receiver Hardware Design
Case Study Fall 2010
Anis Zribi, Ph.D.: Reliability in Electronic Design
Case Study Spring 2010
Brian Freese: Reasons for Doing Thorough Failure Analysis
Case Study Fall 2009
Steve Dunbar, Texas Instruments Analog/RF field applications engineer for the Rocky Mountain Region. A Systems Approach to Project Design
Case Study Fall 2008
Jay Jacobsmeyer, President of Pericle Communications Company, spoke on "Simulcast Radio Network Design."