1. © 2002 University of South Carolina CSCE 491 Computer Engineering Senior Design Project Proposal for Spring 2002 Dr. James P. Davis, Associate Professor Department of Computer Science and Engineering University of South Carolina December 8, 2002

2. © 2002 University of South Carolina Proposal Outline Understood Goal and Objectives of CSCE 491 –Goal statement, Rationale and Objectives Plan to Achieve Goals for the CSCE 491 Program of Study –Activities or content related to each objective. –Required resources to meet each objective. CSCE 491 Course Structure –Ordered set of topics (“knowledge sources”) to be covered in classroom. –Design activities to be performed by students. –Design tool chain and work process. –Emulator test environment for evaluating design work product. Outcomes Assessment –Outcomes metrics and measurements. –How the results will be evaluated against course goals.

3. © 2002 University of South Carolina CSCE 491: Principal Goal and Rationale Principal Goal and Objectives: –To create a senior design course in the curriculum that will provide opportunity for rising or graduating seniors with Computer Engineering emphasis to participate in a design project that will provide real-world project development experience in the scope of a 3 semester hours’ course of study and work. –This course should provide a combination of classroom and hands-on project development in systems architecture, hardware and software design, and include—in a microcosm—those activities associated with design projects taken on by practicing computer engineers in industry. –The coursework to be assigned should require no more than 10-15 hours per week to complete for a given student, thereby limiting the scope of such projects which can be undertaken in this course. –The selected design project should be in a domain that is current, state of the art, challenging, and have tangible results at its completion—so as to give graduating seniors direct, marketable experience in “hot” technologies, thus making them more sought after on the job market. Goal Rationale: –There is more that can be done to prepare our Computer Engineering directed graduates for what is to come in the real-world. This course is to provide them with a “flavor” of what is to come through participation in a real-world computer engineering design project, thus better equipping them.

4. © 2002 University of South Carolina CSCE 491: Sub-goals and Objectives Objectives: –Present the students with classroom lectures in topics required for each to execute the tasks to be assigned to them during the course’s design project. Project Planning, Project Management, Design Methods, Design Process and Tasks, Design Tool Training (where required), Problem Domain knowledge. Assume some pre-requisites: VHDL coursework, C++ coursework, use of Rational Rose in the modeling and design of software systems. However, if these can’t be met, then classroom lecture content will be adapted accordingly to compensate. –Provide environment for project-level team organization, with role and responsibility definition and assignment for each student in a team. Each team will either: (1) be responsible for a sub-module of an overall design, where each team’s design will be integrated with the other teams’ deliverables to create a whole solution, or (2) be responsible for developing the entire system, for which each team will provide a unique design solution for the stated design problem (this choice is To Be Determined). Each student will have an assigned role on the team (e.g., Architect, Interface Designer, Functional Designer, Test Engineer). Each team will have the same roles assigned for consistency. Each student will be coached, through classroom lecture and regularly scheduled personal consultation, on how to execute the role’s tasks and responsibilities.

5. © 2002 University of South Carolina CSCE 491: Sub-goals and Objectives Objectives (continued): –Provide a means for the student performance on the project assignment to be critiqued and evaluated. Each student will be graded on performance in their assigned project role, and in how they support the team. Each student will be graded on their specific output (design work products) and will also be evaluated by their team peers. Such individual contributor evaluations will follow industry standard practice for performance appraisals conducted by project managers, sufficiently adapted for use in an undergraduate 3 semester hour course of study. Each design team will be graded according to the level of functional completeness, design quality and robustness, and level of functional correctness their design artifacts exhibit in accordance to the design project specification. –Provide a means to evaluate the results of each offering of the CSCE 491 course, so that the course can be tuned and improved over subsequent semesters Evaluation based on conformance to ABET guidelines (do such guidelines or recommendations exist in writing?) Evaluation of student performance outcomes for a given semester and across semesters. Evaluation of graduating BS students’ time on the job market, types of jobs obtained, starting salaries, compared across semesters (maybe this is too much, but it would be interesting to see the impact such a focused course of study would have on graduate competitiveness in the workforce.

6. © 2002 University of South Carolina CSCE 491: Study Program Development Plan Program Objective Plan ComponentsRequired Resources Issues List of topics to serve as “knowledge sources” for lectures, and materials to present in class. Current list includes the following: (1) Project planning, management and reporting, (2) Problem Domain – 802.11 WLAN, (3) Design methods and processes, (4) Design tools, and (5) Quality guidelines for creating work products, (6) Team dynamics, roles and responsibilities. This is to be done as part of lecture preparation. (1) Design tools: Rational Rose; blockHDL and flowHDL graphical tools for micro-architecture, RTL and state machine design and animated simulation; HDL simulator (ModelSim), Synthesis (maybe). (2) Graduate student to assist with tool training. The Spring ’02 semester has small class size, so existing resource levels should be adequate. At issue is whether I’ll need someone to provide in- depth tool training for downstream tools (if we get that far on the project). Create appropriate “teaming” environment This will be done through lectures, and regularly scheduled project status meetings. None.Small Spring ’02 class size will limit organization to 1 or 2 teams, depending on workload. Evaluation environment for establishing student/team performance and grades Plan is to build a Protocol emulator for the 802.11 components to be developed as part of the course’s design project. *** Need a graduate student to build the Emulator environment. The statement of work is discussed later in this presentation. I have identified Mr. Narashima Sontineni to help me, pending approval for his support for Spring ’02. Evaluation of effectiveness of course to meet course goals. Define a set of measurable outcomes metrics and the means to measure them at the conclusion of the course, with follow-on data collected. I might need access to placement data on graduating Computer Engineering seniors. This question is whether to go to this trouble. My thought is that there will be publishable work.

7. © 2002 University of South Carolina CSCE 491: Course Curriculum Course Instructional Method: –The approach to be taken in the presentation of the course materials and execution of the design project tasks is to follow an iterative model (based on Mitchell et al., model for learning systems). –The believed benefits of such an approach are as follows: (1) better correlation between lectures and project “labs”, (2) easier process of evaluating student performance, as each design project task is being done, so as to assign grades to individual activities, and to give the student opportunity to learn from mistakes, and (3) provide a better means to insure that the students are getting the material through constant assignment, performance and evaluation, coupled with lectures.