The EE 3714 Lab Manual is available in both Microsoft Word format (.doc) and Adobe Acrobat format (.pdf) via the links on this page.
Each student will be expected to purchase a breadboard/wiring kit from IEEE or HKN before the 2nd week of the semester. This cost is $25; HKN/IEEE representatives will visit each lab in the 2nd week of the semester. Students will also need to purchase a parts kit; this cost is $15 and the parts kits will be sold in lab during the same period that the breadbord kit is purchased. Only cash is accepted for breadboard and part kits purchases (no checks or credit cards will be accepted).
The complete lab manual is available via the links below. Lab manuals from previous semesters are NOT VALID. If you want to save a file to your local disk, right click on the link and use the "Save As" menu choice.
Try to ask your lab TA first about any lab-related problems; if you are not satisifed or still have questions after talking with your TA you can send me (Prof. Robert Reese) email at reese@ece.msstate.edu .
The parts that will be in your parts kit are listed below. If you want to purchase these parts yourself from http://www.digikey.com or some equivalent vendor, feel free.
All labs must be submitted electronically via the Web as either a POSTSCRIPT, PDF, or Microsoft WORD (.doc) file.
Click HERE to go to the WWW page that is used to submit your lab. You MUST know your ECE login name and password to access this page. Click HERE for a FAQ about electronic submission of lab reports --- it will also tell you how to determine your ECE login/password.
A report for an assignment is due at the lab time for the next time your section meets. In some cases, you might have a holiday between between when you perform a lab, and when the next lab meets, which would mean that you would have more than one week to do the lab report. The last lab meeting is an in-lab practicum, so there is no lab report for that lab. In the case of a two week lab there is only one lab report required and this will be due at the lab meeting after the 2nd week of the 2-week lab.
15 points will subtracted per day that a lab is submitted late. The electronic submission directory has time/date information on each file so we can verify when a lab report was submitted. After 1 week (7 days), a lab grade is automatically assigned a 0.
There can be two problems in submitting lab reports via electronic submission. The first problem is that the lab does not reach the server. After you submit your lab, it is YOUR RESPONSIBILITY to check to see if the report reached the server (there is a link provided for this purpose). If it did not reach the server, then keep submitting until it shows up in the report of submitted labs.
The second problem is that you submit your lab report with the wrong lab number. (Submit lab #2 as Lab #3 or submit Lab #5 as Lab #4 which overwrites a previously submitted lab report). This is a USER ERROR, and we cannot prevent you from doing this. If you discover that you have done this, you must resolve this problem with the TA as SOON AS POSSIBLE. It is not acceptable to wait until the end of the semester and then complain about an incorrectly submitted lab that happened several weeks previously. If you do not resolve this with the TA promptly, expect a 0 grade on that lab.
You must earn at least a 60% average on your lab grade or you will fail the course regardless of your lecture grade. This policy is non-negotiable and is independent of the course instructor teaching your lecture session.
ALL students, regardless of major, who take an ECE course (even one that is cross listed as a CS course) receives an ECE login account. You must know this account name in order to electronically submit your lab reports or check your graded lab reports. If this is the FIRST time that you have taken an ECE course, Ms. Katherine Brooks in the ECE main office (Simrall 216) will have an account slip that has the username/password. If Ms. Brooks does not have your slip, or you have forgotten your username/password, then you will need to see Mr. Michael Lane (1st floor, office in Computer Lab, Rm 139). It usually takes a week for new accounts to be added after the 1st class day of the semester.
Data sheets for TTL parts are available via the WWW at this link . This is a search engine; enter a part number like "7400" and you will given a general information sheet plus a link to PDF file that has the complete datasheet (PDF file can only be read with Adobe acrobat). You may need to try technology specific variations on the numbers like "74LS00" instead of "7400", or just type in the last part and omit the '74' (i.e. for 74181, use just 181). Several parts may show up like "SN54LS181", "SN74S181", etc - usually all of these will be functionally equivalent and have the same pinout UNLESS SPECIFICALLY noted on the datasheet. General information on data sheets on CDROM can be found here .
The parts that come in your parts kits are from a variety of vendors and may be a mixture of CMOS and TTL parts. The pinouts for a 7400 (a package that has 4 NAND gates) will be the same regardless of whether or not it is TTL or CMOS, or which vendor made it. However, the timing information will vary depending on CMOS vs TTL and the vendor. You may need to locate the datasheet for a specific part number, such as 'MM74C04' for some labs in order to get the correct timing information. To locate this datasheet, go to google.com and search using keywords 'semiconductor parts locator'. This will give you several links to varies search engines that can be used to locate the vendor for a particular part (such as http://www.onlinetechx.com ). Once you know the specific vendor name (such as Fairchild , National Semiconductor , Motorola , Texas Instruments , etc), you can use google.com to locate their site -- once at the vendors web site, you should be able to use their search engine to locate a PDF datasheet for your particular data sheet. You will need to do some digging but the information is out there.
Starting with Lab #6, some of the labs will have an Altera MAX+PLUS II
simulation requirement. The book
"Fundamentals of Digital Logic with
VHDL Design" by Stephen Brown and Zvonko Vranesic has the Maxplus software on
CDROM in the back cover.
Alternatively, you can download the MAX+PLUS Student Edition Software (v. 10.1) directly from the Altera Website. (look at the bottom of the page for the download link for student version 10.1 . The file size is 48 MBytes -- if you do not have a fast internet connection, I would suggest using one of the PCs in the Simrall first floor lab and writing the file to CDROM (these PCs have CD-writers).
Obtain a license file from Altera for either version 10.1 or version 9.23 by clicking HERE .
The use of Altera Maxplus in this course is very basic. You only need to know how to enter simple schematics and create small waveform files to stimulate inputs and view outputs.
To demo your Maxplus simulation prelab to the Lab TA, use a laptop PC if you have one. If you don't have a laptop PC, then bring screenshots of your schematics + simulations for TA signoff. At some later semester, once the laptop PC requirement has percolated thru the engineering student population, we will no longer accept screenshots.
For lab reports, you will want to include Altera schematics and simulation results.
One way to do this is via the 'ALT+PRINT_SCREEN' key on the keyboard, this will copy the currently active window to the clipboard. You can then paste this into your document. You may want to use an image editor to crop only the portion of the image that has your schematic. You should also save the file as either as a '.gif' or '.jpg' image to reduce your file size - do not use '.bmp' as this will produce a large file size for your lab document.
There are other programs available that allow you do a a 'screen capture' of the portion of the screen with the schematic or simulation results and paste this as a picture object into your report. There are dozens of shareware/freeware screen capture utilities available for Windows platforms. Go to ZDNET Downloads Section and do a search for 'screen capture'. Download one of the utilities that pops up and try it out. If it is a shareware title and the author requests that you purchase the program after a trial period, please honor the author's request if you continue to use it after the trial period. One program that I like is called 'HyperSnap' and is well worth the shareware fee (you can use it for free but images will have a Hypersnap logo in them). And no, I don't work for Hyperionics.com.
For consistency purposes, count Lab #7 as 200 points (100 points for each part). The in-lab final exam counts as a normal lab exercise (100 points). Your spreadsheet should have 13 entries (1300 points total).
Some labs require JEDEC files for PLD functions. Here are the required files (the .jed file is needed for programming, the other files are provided for information purposes).
To convert a .doc file to PDF from within MS Word, print to the 'Acrobat Distiller' printer. Occassionally, you might have MS Word crash during this process - One cause of this is the use of 'Arial Unicode MS' font in the document, which can happen if a cut and paste from a web page was placed into the .doc file. You can use the Find/Replace option in MS Word to find and replace 'fonts' of some type with another. When the find/replace menu comes up, look at the bottom, and chose the 'format' option, then chose the 'font' option. Replace 'Arial Unicode MS' with 'Times New Roman' and you should no longer have the problem.