Priority One:

Our Department is faced with an excellent opportunity for a major upgrade and consolidation in one of it's major instructional laboratory areas in Cory Hall.  Plans are to spend a combination of some Departmental and mostly industry-donated funds for a significant infrastructure improvement of over 3400 square feet of instructional lab space this summer.  The results of a student survey, and a recent ABET review, have confirmed our ongoing need to improve the student experience in our labs, addressing both quality of space, as well as number of lab stations.  The labs using the equipment run 7x24 for the project portion of the semester, with long queues and many frustrated students.  Also, since the lab is getting more and more involved in embedded systems and analog interfaces, there is now a need for instruments to generate analog waveforms as well.  It is also for the quantity of lab stations that we come to Agilent seeking help.  The labs we are targeting are senior level design courses dealing with embedded systems, digital design, and mixed signal, namely EECS150 and EECS192.  The new lab will be called a Mixed Signal Systems Lab, with a current total enrollment of 400 per year.  The limiting factors to enrollment have been staff, space, and the number of work stations.

Another major change that is under way is an upgrade in EECS105.  After the recent restructuring of the EECS undergraduate curriculum, EE105 has shifted its emphasis toward basic device physics, device models, and analog circuit analysis and design. Over the past five years, HP/Agilent's equipment support has established an outstanding device characterization capability in 353 Cory Hall -- the lab room for EE 105.  However, the new emphasis on analog circuits is not as well supported by the current instrumentation. For example, vintage HP 3575A gain/phase meters are used to characterize the frequency response of amplifiers. With students now learning the concepts of phasor analysis and frequency response for the first time in EE 105, it would be a great improvement if they could use network analyzers for these measurements. The Agilent 4395A Network Analyzer would have a major impact on students' ability to visualize the variations in gain and phase with frequency, determine pole and zero locations, and isolate the effect of board-level parasitics.  Access to several of these instruments would enable the development of new experiments, as well as the improvement of all of the circuit experiments in EE 105's lab.  We are requesting two of these this year, and at the same time are proposing a less direct and less costly approach, using VEE Pro.  This approach gives us the opportunity to replace (and deploy elsewhere) the obsolete HP8116A function generators with the current Agilent 33250A 80MHz ARBs.  The plan is to put all the instruments on the GPIB bus, and using the 33250A's bandwidth limited white noise source and the two channel digital scopes, upload averaged reference and DUT data from each scope channel into a PC running VEE Pro.  From that data, we propose to derive the phase and magnitude information of our DUT using a Fourier Transform.  This second approach is a bit more involved and is bandwidth limited, but it does offer us the ability to perform some gain phase measurements on all the stations more cost effectively, and at the same time replace the obsolete gain phase meter and function generators.

We would gladly share all of our experiments with Agilent clients/universities, of course.

EECS150: Components and Design Techniques for Digital Systems

Faculty in charge: Profs. Katz, Wawrzynek, Pister, and Newton

Description: This extremely popular course covers basic building blocks and design methods to construct synchronous digital systems, logic families, finite state machines, and a substantial design project.  The final project requires students to work from a detailed specification of input-output characteristics of the project to a real functional and documented hardware implementation.  Recent projects have included video cameras, A/D converters, and programmable gate arrays to perform spot tracking and image velocity estimation, and a telephone system.

EECS192: Mechatronics Design Lab

Faculty in charge: Prof. Fearing

Description: This extremely competitive course builds on materials covered in EECS150 and other labs to design and build an autonomous vehicle.  Nationwide competitions between other schools are held, and our students have excelled.

Total enrollment/year: 20

Equipment Requested:

EECS105: Microelectronic Devices and circuits

Faculty in charge: Prof. Howe

Enrollment/year: 280

Description: This course covers the physics and modeling of semiconductor devices, including diodes, MOSFETs, and bipolar small-signal amplifiers are discussed in depth, including differential pairs, current-source biasing, and two-stage operational amplifiers. Frequency response and the analysis of feedback are also covered.

Equipment requested:

Qty.	Model	Description	Cost each	Total cost
2	4195A	300MHz Network/Spectrum Analyzer	$26,800	$53,600
2	87511A	50 Ohm S-Parameter Test Sets	5,170	$10,340
	opt. 001	N Type Port	$0	$0
14	33250A	ARB/Function Generator	$4,250	$59,500
				$123,440

Priority Two:

We have a number of labs in which the Semiconductor Parameter Analyzers are used.  Some of the older 4145A/B units are becoming difficult to maintain, and our labs are also expanding in scope.  The labs listed below time share the use of a limited number of Semiconductor Parameter Analyzers. We have recently automated the characterization process in EECS143 to increase the efficiency of use of the SPAs, and have added MEMS capability, but still fall short in the larger EECS105 labs. EECS105, 140, and 141 share the same lab space, and the two labs are undergoing a major revision.

The Device Characterization lab is also undergoing a major revision and renovation is in a position to add new needed functionality.  Noise is arguably the ultimate device-imposed limit to a wide range of analog circuits.  Its significance is growing with the expanding wireless and communications applications. Yet, noise and noise characterization have been given surprisingly little attention in textbooks and laboratories, and we do not have a noise characterization system.  We now have the opportunity to fill this gap with funding from DoD.  The only missing piece of equipment in this system is 4156B Semiconductor Parameter Analyzer.

EECS105: Microelectronic Devices and circuits

Faculty in charge: Prof. Howe

Enrollment/year: 280

Description: This course covers the physics and modeling of semiconductor devices, including diodes, MOSFETs, and bipolar small-signal amplifiers are discussed in depth, including differential pairs, current-source biasing, and two-stage operational amplifiers. Frequency response and the analysis of feedback are also covered.

ECS143: Processing and Design of Integrated Circuits

Faculty in charge: Profs. Cheung and Spanos

Enrollment/year: 90

Description: This clean room lab is very unique in the undergraduate curriculum. The students design, lay out, build and characterize simple semiconductor circuits, including a ring oscillator.

EECS199/299: Device Characterization Lab

Faculty in charge: Prof. Chengming Hu

Enrollment/year: 100

The Device Characterization Laboratory is well equipped for device measurements of custom devices designed and built in our Microfabrication Laboratory and is used by 50 undergraduate and graduate students.

 Equipment requested:

Qty.	Model	Description	Cost each	Total cost
16	82350A	PCI HP-IB card	$495	$7,920
6	4155C	Semiconductor Parameter Analyzer	$37,400	$224,400
	opt. 060	60Hz. line frequency	$0	$0
	opt. ABA	US - English	$0	$0
6	opt. 16442A	Test fixture	$5,300	$31,800
6	opt. 801	Socket  module	$153	$918
				$265,038

EECS113: Power Electronics

Faculty in charge: Prof. Sanders

Enrollment/year: 20

This is one of our few labs dealing with power electronics, and we plan to do some updating from generators, and power systems and distribution to power devices and power conversion.  We may also add closed-loop control of dc-dc converters to the set of typical experiments.

The equipment will modernize our power electronics instructional laboratory, which has not seen any upgrade for a number of years.  The lab and course cover many areas of the power conversion field, including dc-dc converters, magnetic devices, power semiconductor devices, thermal management, and control.