Kip Coonley

Fundamentals of ECE: A Rigorous, Integrated Introduction to Electrical and Computer Engineering

The Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Department at Duke University, Durham, NC, is undergoing extensive curriculum revisions that incorporate novel content, organization, and teaching methods. The cornerstone of the new curriculum is a theme-based introductory course, fundamentals of ECE. To introduce students to the major areas of ECE in their first year of study, this course is organized around three concepts: 1) how to interface with the physical world; 2) how to transmit energy and information; and 3) how to extract, interpret, and analyze information. To provide insight and motivation, the course is designed to introduce multiple areas of ECE, emphasizing how they are interrelated and how they contribute to the design and functioning of real-world applications. Also, the course must engage its students, many of whom are evaluating ECE as a prospective major and career. To achieve these goals, the course adopts a unifying theme, tightly couples lecture and laboratory exercises, and includes a laboratory experience that emphasizes design, integration, and real applications. The interactive classroom content and laboratory exercises are developed iteratively so that each course component supports the other, rather than one being dominant and driving the other. As the context focus of the laboratory, a robotic platform enables the exploration of a broad range of ECE concepts, both independently and integrated into an entire system. For their final design project, students form small groups, which in turn combine into larger teams, to create robots that work together to overcome realistic challenges. This paper describes the curricular objectives and key course elements that guide course development, the resulting content and structure of the course, and the assessment data that indicate successful achievement of the curricular goals.

Integrating Sensing and Information Processing in an Electrical and Computer Engineering undergraduate curriculum

The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University has completed a full-scale redesign of its undergraduate program based on the theme of Integrated Sensing and Information Processing. This theme provides a coherent, overarching framework that links principles of ECE to each other and to real-world engineering problems. The cornerstone of the new ECE curriculum, Fundamentals of Electrical and Computer Engineering, has been designed to provide students with a holistic view of ECE and as a roadmap for the remainder of the curriculum. Each of four follow-on core courses integrates lateral and vertical connections to other courses through the use of thematic examples. Following the five core courses are seven ECE technical electives that include a theme-based culminating design course. Early and pervasive experiences with open-ended design and project-based learning are primary objectives of the curriculum redesign. Regression analyses of course/instructor evaluation data and descriptions of student design project complexity after the curriculum redesign are presented indicating a positive impact of the curriculum redesign on student learning.

A battery-free RFID sensor tag with fiber-optic tamper detection

We present an ISO18000-6C (EPC Generation 2) compatible battery-free RFID tag designed for a hazardous material monitoring application. This tag is a wirelessly powered sensor device that incorporates a general purpose microprocessor to enable the development of specialized sensor applications. It is housed in a ruggedized enclosure that incorporates a dual-polarized 6 dBi antenna for the 902–928 MHz UHF RFID band. It integrates two custom UHF RFID analog front end ASICs with a general purpose TI MSP430 microcontroller and a fiber-optic tamper detection loop. The tag has a power-up threshold of +3 dBm due to the power requirements of the fiber-optic tamper detection loop. It has a measured operating range of over 5.5 m with a +36 dBm EIRP EPC Generation 2 reader.