Antonio F. Mondragon-Torres

Ultra-low power and the millennium generation

Millennials are a generation of young people currently in training at universities and colleges, and entering the workforce. They have several characteristics that could potentially make them one of the most productive generations ever. On the other hand the concepts of sustainability and energy awareness are part of their vocabulary and most of the jobs will be related to these terms. This work relates an attempt to tailor a microcomputers course to appeal to this generation of students. What we have found is that the traditional teaching formulas have to be adapted to make them usable by millennials who do not know a world without internet, wireless communications and social networking.

An Agile embedded systems capstone course

The objective of this paper is to present the outcomes of an embedded systems senior design capstone course offered for Computer Engineering Technology students. This course has being taught five times using the presented format. At every offering, slight modifications have been done in an attempt to improve the students experience and engagement. The most important intended learning outcomes for this course are: to enable team collaboration, to learn project management techniques, to develop a product from idea to implementation, and to make a professional presentation of their work to an audience. The innovative practices included in this course are: use of Agile Project Management methodologies, no paper trail all information is in electronic form, emulation of an entrepreneurial experience.

Work in progress — An agile embedded systems design capstone course

Embedded systems design has been characterized by the combination of two basic design methodologies: Hardware and Software. In this work in progress we incorporated Agile Project Management methodologies to a Computer Engineering Technology senior capstone course on product ideation, prototyping, demonstration and final presentation. As students were going through the course, they were; imprinting their stories on a wiki; creating, self assigning, working and closing tasks; following an Agile like methodology; and behaving like an entrepreneurial start-up company that wants to launch an innovative product.

A digital bandgap reference

A digital bandgap reference that provides a programmable reference voltage output is presented. It uses the same idea as an analog bandgap circuit except that the three operations of differencing, scaling and addition are done in the digital domain after converting the operands, the analog junction-diode voltages, into numbers. Digital signal processing provides both precision and programmability. The computed result is converted back to obtain the analog output voltage. The voltage drop across one of the current-biased diodes is used as reference in performing both the analog to digital and digital to analog conversions. Both of these conversions are done in a short time period to ensure that the reference voltage remains constant. Thus the reference voltage value cancels and becomes immaterial. It also becomes easier to address issues like curvature correction in the digital domain. Simulation results are presented for a nominal digital bandgap reference 1.2V with a variation of <;0.22% over -40 to 125μC.

Work in progress — Ultra-low power and the Millennium Generation

Millennials are a generation of young people currently in training at universities and colleges, and entering the workforce. They have several characteristics that could potentially make them one of the most productive generations ever. On the other hand the concepts of sustainability and energy awareness are part of their vocabulary and most of the jobs will be related to these terms. This work relates an attempt to tailor a microcomputers course to appeal to this generation of students. What we have found is that the traditional teaching formulas have to be adapted to make them usable by millennials who do not know a world without internet, wireless communications and social networking.

Embedded systems design curriculum conversion from quarters to semesters

In this paper we present a vision of how a sequence of three embedded systems design courses currently being taught for computer engineering technology students will be adapted from a quarter based delivery to a semester based delivery. The conversion brings the opportunity to revise the course contents, platforms used and make changes that will prepare students with a more up-to-date skill set and a robust industrial training. In this work in progress we will present some of the new ideas that will be implemented in our semester courses. After offering these courses multiple times, feedback will be gathered from students and industry, and a future study will be presented outlining the achieved outcomes as compared to our intended outcomes for curriculum continuous improvement.

Formulation, analysis, and hardware implementation of chaotic dynamics based algorithm for compression and feature recognition in digital images

In this paper we will discuss the utilization of a set of waveforms derived from chaotic dynamical systems for compression and feature recognition in digital images. We will also describe the design and testing of an embedded systems implementation of the algorithm. We will show that a limited set of combined chaotic oscillations are sufficient to form a basis for the compression of thousands of digital images. We will demonstrate this in the analysis of images extracted from the solar heliospheric observatory (SOHO), showing that we are able to detect coronal mass ejections (CMEs) in quadrants of the image data during a severe solar event. We undertake hardware design in order to optimize the speed of the algorithm, taking advantage of its parallel nature. We compare the calculation speed of the algorithm in compiled C, enhanced Matlab, Simulink, and in hardware.

Architecture exploration, development and teaching platform for Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) systems

The objective of the presented work is to have a complete system level Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing development platform where students both undergraduate and graduate can use it to explore and identify the different processing blocks available on modern communications systems. The platform will allow monitoring the inputs and outputs of every block to observe the signals as well as to be able to substitute each block by their own implementation. This could be done using a high level language such as Matlab/Simulink and C/C++, or the block can be substituted by a Hardware Description Language (HDL) such as: automatic Simulink to HDL, automatic C/C++ to HDL or directly by a HDL implementation. In addition, the concept of Hardware in the loop is introduced where the block is actually run on field programmable gate array (FPGA) hardware. The platform allows the use of the FPGA as a hardware accelerator or coprocessor. Different tradeoffs in algorithm hardware implementations can be explored such as: signal throughput, floating to fixed point conversion, hardware resources, silicon area estimates, power consumption, maximum operating frequency, and signal to quantization noise ratio.