Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, 9:30-10:40pm, Cowell 134.
January 20 and February 17 are holidays; class meets on Tuesday,
February 18.
The final will be on Tuesday March 18 at 8:00am.
Microprocessor-Based Design, Michael Slater, Prentice Hall, 1989. The course text. In the fast-paced world of microprocessors, it's starting to get old, but it has an excellent treatment of system design issues and does not restrict itself to a single family.
Various supplementary materials, such as an HC11 manual and a handout on analog to digital and digital to analog conversions will also be provided.
Assignments will be distributed from
http://www.cse.ucsc.edu/~rph/class/ce121. Commentary, hints, and
other information will be posted in the class newsgroup called
ucsc.class.cmpe121. To read, do a bind_locker public
and use rn (or xrn) to read the newsgroup. You can post
articles by either following up other articles (`f' or
`F' when reading an article in rn, the second form
providing a copy of the original article) or using the Pnews
program.
Postscript files posted to this newsgroup can be viewed, after
eliminating the header information, using the ghostview
command in the gnu locker.
The focus of this course is on the design techniques necessary to build complex digital systems that can interface to the analog world.
The major evaluation criteria are homework (20%), quizzes (25%), midterm (a long quiz) (15%), and a final (40%) given on Tuesday, March 18, 8:00am-11:00am. Acceptable performance in each of the three criteria individually will be necessary to pass the course (for example, you cannot pass the course if you complete only half the homework assignments). If you are taking both the 121 and 121L, success or failure will be joint between CE121 and CE121L with a 60% 121, 40% 121L weighting, enabling excellent lab work to help you succeed in class. If you request letter grades, you may receive different grades for each part.
Quizzes will be given alternate Wednesdays on the lectures, homework, prelab, and lab assignments of the previous two weeks. Homework will be assigned and due on Wednesdays. Late homework will not be accepted, and missed quizzes cannot be made up. However, the lowest homework score and the lowest quiz score will be dropped to allow for unavoidable circumstances. Each homework assignment will have 10 (of 100) discretionary points awarded for clarity and completeness of answers and overall neatness. (From a baseline of 5 points, good things include clearly marked answers, clear explanations, neat diagrams using a ruler and/or graph paper, and typesetting; bad things include no name, no staples, messy writing, out of order problems, and unclear breaks between problems.)
Homework and lab work is to be your own work, though you may, if needed, discuss problems in general terms with your classmates, the TA, or the instructor. All writeups must be independent -- if two or more assignments appear to be the result of copying, both assignments will be heavily penalized, regardless of who originated the work, and repeat occurrences will lead to failure. To be entirely safe, after any discussions with your classmates, first do something inane, and then write up your assignment without referring to any notes from your conversations. Faculty are required to report all cases of academic dishonesty to the appropriate college provost.
If you have worked with any other people, in the class or not, or gained insight during a TA session or by reading the newsgroup, give credit to those sources at the top of your assignment. Acknowledging, and even over-acknowledging, contributions is an important habit when working on group projects.
Lab assignments will be distributed on the Friday before your lab session. Lab work will be written up in your bound lab notebook and evaluated during your lab session the week after the lab is performed. The final project will require a separate report and user's guide. The first lab sessions will be held on Thursday, January 9, and Friday, January 10.
In lab, each student will create there own microcontroller system using an HC11 microcontroller. We will use wirewrap boards, so you will be able to keep your system after completing the course. The lab parts kit will cost $68 (bring a check to the first lab), and there will be a $20 deposit on the wire wrap tool (bring a separate check, or purchase one at Fry's).
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Quizzes will be given on the Wednesday of each week marked with an
asterisk (*).