| Administrative Syllabus |
Lecture Notes Lecture 1 Lecture 2 Lecture 3 Lecture 4 Lecture 5 |
Labs Lab 1 Lab 2 Lab 3 Lab 4 Lab 5 VLSI Design with Electric |
The seminar covers digital electronics, breadboarding, basic transistor operation, and layout of integrated circuits. It will meet one evening a week for lecture and lab, leading to a final project involving the layout of a chip. The class will be open to six students randomly selected from those who apply during the summer. The six students will also have Professor Harris as their freshman advisor.
If you are considering taking the class, you should have no prior background in digital electronics; if you do have background, let somebody else take the seminar. The seminar is given for one pass/fail credit. On account of the freshman load limit, you may not be simultaneously taking any other credit-bearing classes (such as music) on top of your required freshman classes and this seminar.
This class is a new experiment in freshman advising, bringing together an advisor and freshmen in an area of common interest. Chip design is usually not taught until the senior or graduate level, but the basics require little mathematics and are remarkably easy to learn even though they may appear to be "black magic" to the uninitiated. The engineering department is dedicated to a broad program, but this seminar will give you the chance to explore one area in more depth and see both the remarkable things you can do with little background and the need for more theory and mathematics to gain a deeper understanding. We apologize for the limited space, but want to keep the seminar small to allow close faculty-student interaction.