Title:	ECE 4900 - Senior Thesis I, Fall 2010
Instructor:	Ken Stevens, kstevens@ece.utah.edu, MEB 4506, 585-9176
Classes:	Wed 3:00 - 4:00
Office Hours:	by appointment
Web Page:	www.eng.utah.edu/~kstevens/4900/4900.html
Prerequisites:	ECE 3910

This course is for students with major status who are seniors within one year of graduation. The clinic sections come with additional requirements and benefits than the traditional senior thesis sections. Only students selected by the ECE department to participate in the Micron clinic will be able to participate in this course.

In this course the students will implement an engineering project that is defined by Micron. This project is planned and executed to completion over the course of two semesters (4910 in the spring).

There are several major goals for this project, which will prepare the students for industry or graduate work:

1. Define and complete a significant engineering project
2. Develop proposal and presentation skills
3. Project organization, planning, and teamwork skills

Incomplete Policy:	You can't get an incomplete unless you have a documented medical or legal emergency.
College Guidelines:	Refer to the college policy on adding and dropping classes, etc.
Disability:	If you have a condition that merits consideration, you must contact the instructor at the beginning of the course.

Location Legend:

MEB-3259	Clinic Room
MEB-3235	ECE Conference Room
MEB-4506	Stevens' Office
MEB-3315	Micron Lab

Aug 25	Teamwork lecture Location: MEB-3235
Sep 3	Meeting with Tim Hollis on Project Proposal. Time: 9:30-10:30am Location: MEB-3235
Sep 8	Proposal discussion and Project Management lecture. Location: MEB-3235
Sep 15	Technology Review of Flash Memory. Location: MEB-3259
Sep 22	Anatomy of a Proposal lecture. Location: MEB-3235
Sep 24	Writing Good Proposals lecture. Location: MEB-3259
Oct 6	Potential meeting with Tim Hollis and Micron Foundation.
Oct 13	Due:Proposal First Draft Due
Oct 20	Proposal review, project discussion, web page requirements. Due: Final Proposal Due: Web page setup and reporting starting this week.
Nov 17	Discussion of Project and Deliverables Due: Diagram and List of the body of the project including:      A diagram of your finished project, COMPLETED PROJECT DELIVERABLES and stretch goals, interfaces specifications and tasks, project tasks with schedule and milestones, task risk assessment, testing and integration strategy, bill of materials with vendor list and cost, references used so far (including mentors), [group] communication plan...
Dec 3	Final presentation discussion.
Dec 10	Final mid-year performance report presentation by students. Due: 10 minute individual presentations on technical contribution this semester. Due: Team paper that includes contributions and designs as built to this point.

The project this year will entail the analysis of power delivery systems onto integrated circuits.

We continue to attempt to lower the power and energy consumption of our integrated circuits, because we are doubling the number of transistors on a chip every 18 to 24 months. One of the primary methods of lowering power is to reduce the supply voltage. However, this has a few drawbacks as it increases the current, Further, controlling inductive effects is challenging on a planar integrated circuit.

This project will investigate several important topics in this domain, including:

• understand the accuracy of current tools and models
• simplifying abstractions that give relatively high accuracy
• study the variation that occurs in circuits based on power supply noise

Following is information useful for the class, including web page setup for your web logs, lectures, and helpful notes.

Clear instructor's calendars for presentations and feedback.

Additional clinic information from the ece department.

Project planning notes

The Micron Proposal that Tim Hollis gave us to help define the 2009-2010 project.

Also refer to the 2008-2009 Micron Proposal that Tim Hollis gave us as background information.

Synopsys HSIMPlus reference manual.

Synopsys HSIMPlus simulation manual.

Web Page Setup

The downloaded file, public_html.tar, contains some web pages that you can use if you are unfamiliar with creating web pages. To install these pages, do the following:

1. Download the above file to your home directory on the CADE server.
2. If you already have a directory public_html, then:
   • cd public_html
   • cp index.html index.html.original
   • cd ..
   this will back up your original web page.
3. tar xvf public_html.tar
4. chmod -R 755 public_html

This will create a template of the web pages you need to set up the 4900 logs. Contact me if you have any questions.

These are the projects which the students developed in past years:

2009-2010:

• Evaluation of Integrated Circuit Power Supply Noise with Two-Phase Analysis
  The Project Home Page.
  Ammon Hardcastle, Sze-Hsiang Harper, Kristian Blomquist, Jason Oneida, and Michael Tomer.

• Analysis and Optimization of Multi Gb/s Chip-to-Chip Communication
  See the Utah home page and the goggle code page that includes a demo and full source of the project.
  Raheem Alhamdani, Jordan Kemp, Bryson Kent, Lucas Loero, and Ben Meakin

• Open Source SLC NAND Flash Failure Analysis Platform.
  Their google web page contains the source code and further documentation.
  Greg Bray, Jeff Gorton, Jonathan Morgan, Kyle Stewart, Garrett Thomas.

• Visualizing Wireless Reception
  Individual senior project
  Eli Ribble.

• NAND Flash failure behavior beyond SLC Specifications.
  David Chu, Jeremy Hamblin, Robert Wells, and Roger White.

• Project Sharc: Digital Signal Audio Processing.
  Individual senior project
  Leo Asku

• Remote Monitoring and Control for Ozone Generator
  Brandon Bartosh.

• Computer Chip Cooling System using Parallel Microchannels
  Clint Brown.

• Design and Fabrication of a Microheater Control System
  Michael Chambers.

• Interactive Slow and Ultra-Luminescence Light Exhibit for Leonardo Science Museum at Library Square
  John Davis.

• Capturing High Quality Video
  Justin Horn, James Hu, and Bryce Orgill.