1. 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…

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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

5. 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

6. 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)

7. 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