ECE 101

• Core Curriculum

Intended for students outside the College of Engineering. Credit is not given to students enrolled in Electrical or Computer Engineering.

ECE 101 introduces students outside the College of Engineering to the principles and processes by which technologies are developed. Specifically, students learn about the engineering principles that underlie selected contemporary information technologies; they learn

• How digital audio devices play music
• How digital images and videos are produced, stored, and enhanced
• How computers process information
• How information is transmitted efficiently over communication networks
• Students learn the principles that underlie the operation of CD players, PDAs, cell phones, and the Internet. Beyond these technical principles, student learn that
• The development of new products requires both scientific knowledge and creativity
• New products are not created out of a vacuum: they build logically on experience gained with older products; each artifact is itself a component of a larger system
• In the development of a new product, engineering design decisions involve tradeoffs between cost and performance to achieve technical goals within economic and social constraints
• Technologies are shaped by society, and in turn, they have an impact on society
• In the laboratory, students digitize and synthesize sounds, manipulate images, design a small digital system, and create an interactive Web site.

Development of technology

• Analyze economic, social, and physical constraints on the design of new products (h)
• List activities that engineers undertake in designing a new product (c)
• List significant decisions in the design of a new product and explain tradeoffs (c)
• Use Moore’s law to predict the number of transistors on a chip in the future (h)

Programming and networking

• Explain the differences between natural, markup, and programming languages (h)
• Create webpages using HTML, including headings, tables, lists, formatting, and hyperlinks (c, k)
• Use library JavaScript functions to create interactive webpages (c, k)
• Develop flow charts for algorithms (e)
• Write basic programs including I/O, variables, conditionals, operations, loops, and subroutines (c, k)
• Explain the basic elements of the Internet protocol for transferring files and wepages between computers (a)

Digital audio and image processing

• Identify one- and two-dimensional signals (a)
• For a periodic signal, calculate frequency from period and vice versa (a)
• Determine the phase difference between two sinusoids (a)
• Determine the result of superposition of two periodic signals (e)
• Convert analog signals to digital signals through sampling and quantization (a)