Transcript Digital Systems are Ubiquitous

Digital Systems Emphasis for Electrical
Engineering Students
Digital Systems skills are very valuable for
electrical engineers
• Digital systems are the de-facto implementation medium for
all kinds of systems:
• Communications systems
• Control systems
• Power systems
• Electromechanical systems
Some things to think about when choosing your
technical elective courses…
Digital Systems are Ubiquitous
They interact with people and the physical world
• They sense, compute, and control things
• A modern car has up to 50 microcomputers inside
• Cell phones, MP3 players, appliances, Power Grid, GPs…
• Taking over domains that used to be analog
• Communications, control, signal processing…
• Digital speeds getting faster & faster: “software radio”
Why?
Often easier, cheaper to design & implement than analog
•“Digital Abstraction” – reduce analog values to ‘0’ and ‘1’
• Not sensitive to process variations, temperature, etc.
• Design with software & hardware description languages
Digital System Components
• Logic “core”
•FPGAs – design in VHDL or Verilog
•Application-specific integrated Circuits: VHDL or Verilog
•Microcontrollers and Digital Signal Processors: C or C++
• Memory
• Interconnect:
• Between chips
• Between systems: Local Area Networks, wireless
• Wide-area networks (Internet)
• Power supply
• Software
Software Skills
You can’t have too much software skill!
• Industry is full of industry-specific languages & protocols
• A strong foundation makes it easy to pick them up
• CS120 & CS121: Computer Science I and II
• Programming C and C++
• Dynamic data structures
• Structured and object-oriented programming
• CS382 – Software Engineering
•How to sucessfully design and test large software systems
• CS/MATH395: Analysis of Algorithms
• MATH473: Numerical Analysis
Digital Tech Electives
18 tech electives, 300 & 400 level
• 12 from ECE
• 6 from ECE, CS, Physics or Math
• Build your own digital systems emphasis
ECE440: Digital Systems Engineering
• Emphasis on FPGAs, VHDL
• Design & test complex systems
• High-Performance design techniques
ECE443: Distributed Process & Control Networks
• Many things controlled over networks
• E.g. the Power Grid, now and future
More Digital Tech Electives
ECE455: Information and Coding Theory
• How is information coded for transmission, storage and use?
• How does MP3 work? JPEG? Encryption? Error correction?
• What is information bandwidth? How do we design for it?
ECE445: Very Large Scale Integrated Circuits (VLSI
• Chip-level design of digital components
• Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs)
ECE476: Digital Filtering
• How to design digital filters & implement them in hardware
Computer Science Embedded Computing Classes
• Embedded System Design
• Real-time Operating Systems (RTOS)
Even More Digital Tech Electives
ECE455: Information and Coding Theory
• How is information coded for transmission, storage and use?
• How does MP3 work? JPEG? Encryption? Error correction?
• What is information bandwidth? How do we design for it?
ECE445: Very Large Scale Integrated Circuits (VLSI
• Chip-level design of digital components
• Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs)
ECE471: Digital Control Systems
• Design control systems, implement them with digital hardware
ECE476: Digital Filtering
• How to design digital filters & implement them in hardware