Projects and Labs
The University of Utah ECE Department has a unique and interesting set of undergraduate laboratories. Instead of building a few individual components, these labs give you the chance to build the components, and then combine them into a working system to give you a better understanding of how the different parts work together. We gratefully acknowledge the support of the National Science Foundation who supported the development of these labs under grant NSF0431958.
If you find problems/typos/etc with these labs, please email the contacts at the bottom of this page. If you are an instructor interested in implementing these labs at your university, email the contacts at the bottom of the page.
The following is a listing of all system level design projects implemented in the ECE curricula.
ECE 1250: Introduction to Electrical and Computer Engineering
Design, evaluate, build, test, and debug simple circuits using voltage and current sources, resistors and capacitors, op amps, and diodes. Each lab will give you tools to build to the final 3 week project – an electrical invention of your own choosing!
ECE 2240: Fundamentals of Electric Circuits
Project: Electromagnetic Launcher
In this project, you will construct and test an EM launcher similar in many respects to the coil guns described above; but to avoid the time, expense, and danger involved in constructing a device to launch larger projectiles, yours will be a miniature coil gun consisting of one small coil, and the projectile will be a short (3-4 mm) segment of wire from a standard paper clip. Because the magnetic forces on the projectile would force it to the center of the coil if a steady current were applied, you will need to design a circuit to produce a short current pulse and, to get sufficient force for launching, the current must be high. Therefore you will also design a circuit to discharge a capacitor into a coil to produce a short, high-current pulse. This project is but one example of many ways in which voltage and current pulses are employed in a variety of devices.
ECE 2280: Fundamentals of Engineering Electronics
Project: Regulated DC Power Supply
Design a dual rail, regulated, DC power supply to supply enough current to operate an op-amp based microphone and speaker circuit created as part of the second class lab and supported by the concepts of the third lab.
ECE 3110: Engineering Electronics II
Project: EMG Sensor with Audiovisual output
Design a dual rail, regulated, DC power supply to supply enough current to operate an op-amp based microphone and speaker circuit created as part of the second class lab and supported by the concepts of the third lab.
ECE 3300: Introduction to Electromagnetics
Project: Cardiac Pacemaker Communication System
Students will build and test a wireless communication system for a cardiac pacemaker. A matching network for a monopole antenna will be built. The received power from the transmitting antenna embedded in muscle simulant will be measured. The receiving antenna is attached to an amplifier and splitter that detects if 420 or 460 MHz signals are received.
ECE 3500: Introduction to Signals and Systems
Project: Cardiac Pacemaker Communication System – FSK Transceiver
This is a five week long experiment about frequency and amplitude modulation. Using electronic components, students build a frequency shift keying (FSK) circuit. Both modulator and demodulator modules are constructed and tested. The carrier frequencies used here are 1 kHz and 5 kHz, for representation of logical 0 and 1, respectively. We have purposefully chosen these low frequencies to allow straightforward prototyping in the laboratory using bread boards. The concepts from this experiment are expanded in the EM class where students build the FSK system in the MHz range.
ECE 3510: Introduction to Feedback Systems
Project: Magnetic Levitation Control System
Controls Students build a simple magnetic levitation system, measure its system response, and design a hardware or software control system to allow the user to define the vertical rise and response dynamics of the levitated object. The course also includes a hardware PLL for timing acquisition that will draw a link between ECE3500 and ECE3510.
ECE 5320: Microwave Engineering I
Project: FSK Wireless Local Area Network
Students build an FSK WLAN from microstrip components. This is an adaptation of labs at BYU and USU.
ECE 5324: Antenna theory and design
Project: Multi Band Patch Antenna Design
The students designed dual-band patch antennas for use for wireless telephone (835 and 1900 MHz) and wireless LAN communications (2.45 and 5.5 GHz). The patch antennas were tested for their performance in our newly renovated anechoic chamber and network analyzer stations.
ECE 5530: Digital signal processing
Project: QPSK Communication System
We developed three modules that together allow the students to simulate a complete QPSK system in software. In these modules, the students apply concepts of sampling, filter realizations, filter designs and discrete Fourier transform in their implementations.
ECE 5570: Control of Electric Motors
Project: Motor Control System
This course starts with identification and control of DC motors on a prototyping platform. Then the control of stepper and induction motor is presented. Finally the class is completed with a student project for controlling a Brushless DC motor. This course has cross-over with the embedded system courses by providing a platform similar to embedded motor lab.
ECE 5780: Embedded Systems Design
Project: Microcontroller Design
Students designed simple systems using a Motorola HC(S)12 microcontroller and peripheral hardware. Labs included design a keypad interface, a thread scheduler, a simple serial network, pulse generator, DC motor controller that utilizes a 4-bit DAC.
Microsystems
Overview of the Microsystems Labs
Project: Nanosensor project
Packaging, system integration and reliability studies are the topics tying together the entire canon of micro, nano, sensor and electronics technology courses. Packaging requires a thorough understanding of system integration and the awareness of system and application/market requirements.
Program Contacts
For more information contact:
Cynthia Furse at cfurse@ece.utah.edu or
Bryan Stenquist at bstenqui@ece.utah.edu