Mixed-Signal/Telecommunications Curriculum Development and Internet2 Delivery

This paper describes efforts within the Electrical Engineering Department at the University of Arkansas to develop several new courses for widespread dissemination via Internet2. An advisory board, comprised of industry and professors at the UA and other institutions, evaluates the courses annually so that improvements can be made at each successive stage of dissemination. State of the art evaluation techniques are being developed to facilitate these assessments. Experts in their respective fields, from industry and national laboratories, will actively participate in offering the courses. The courses being offered cover the design, analysis, and testing of mixed-signal/telecommunications (MST) circuits and systems. Each course offers particular challenges to distance delivery. These challenges and their respective solutions will be described. New course design when the target is ultimately distance delivery via Internet2 is addressed as well. Lastly, the design of modular courses for rapid introduction of recent research developments is described. I. Introduction The economy of this nation recently boomed on the proverbial back of an electronics revolution. The growth of the consumer electronics market (e.g., personal computers, cellular phones, pagers, etc.) has been truly phenomenal. It has fueled tremendous innovation in hardware design, software design, and special-purpose computational algorithms. Placing accurate numbers on this high technology boom is subjective, but the order of magnitude of electronic-end equipment alone has been estimated at 5% of the U.S. gross domestic product 1 . Mixed-signal circuits and systems are significant to this growth. Consider that CD players, cellular phones, pagers, global positioning systems, televisions, and stereos are all comprised of mixed-signal circuits. These estimates don’t even touch upon the automobiles, airplanes, and commuter and high-speed trains that all have many mixed-signal subsystems on them. Examples from the transportation market sector include anti-lock braking systems, fuel injection systems, power steering, avionics, actuator control of wings, and traction control of trains. As circuits and systems become more complex, the design and test issues become increasingly difficult to manage without advanced computer-aided design (CAD) tools. The current motivations for the implementation of systems-on-a-chip (SoC) highlight these difficulties 2 . However, preceding that technological frontier is the barrier of full-chip design and