A Multidisciplinary Integrated Capstone Design Curriculum for
Electrical and Computer Engineering
A proposal to the National Science Foundation
Submitted by
N. Goldsman, J. Orloff, S. Bhattacharyya, G. Blankenship, C. Davis, R. Etienne-Cummings, W. Hawkins, R. Liu, M.Wu and S. Marcus
Project Description
I. Introduction
The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at the University of Maryland at College Park (UMCP) is beginning to plan for a major curriculum revision. This process will start with the Capstone design program, which is the culmination of the students’ experience in the electrical and computer engineering programs at UMCP. The novel aspect of the proposed revision is that it integrates the Capstone Design program into the entire engineering curriculum. That is, sophomores and juniors, as well as seniors, will participate in the Capstone design and analysis processes. Another novel aspect is that we plan to use the outcomes of the Capstone experience as data for guiding the revision of our curriculum in general.
A major objective of the Capstone design courses is for the students to produce a professional quality team project that makes use of most of the knowledge that they have acquired in the previous two to three years in the ECE curriculum. Therefore, the outcome of the capstone experience is an ideal indicator of the efficacy of the education process in the ECE Department. Thus, by assessing the outcomes of these Capstone design courses from year to year, we will be making continuous improvements in the sophomore, junior, and senior year curricula. Once the revision of the Capstone program is underway, we will use it as a focal point for the assessment and revision of the curriculum as a whole.
The first year of our curriculum revision process will focus on the development of a Capstone design program that integrates senior, junior and sophomore ECE students, and which allows students to work on multidisciplinary projects. This idea evolves from the University of Maryland’s Gemstone [1] program (which was established with the aid of grants from the National Science Foundation, General Electric Corp. and A.T.T. Corp). Gemstone brings together multidisciplinary teams of students from diverse majors ranging from the hard sciences to the humanities. These teams, which are formed in the freshman year, undertake multi-year research projects. The projects are student-initiated, and are guided by Mentors (called Gemstone Fellows) who are senior faculty members at the University of Maryland. In the senior year, each team writes and presents a thesis describing its research to a panel of industry, government, and academic leaders.
Our proposed new Capstone design experience is similar to Gemstone in the sense that it brings in multi-disciplinary ideas, and facilitates continuity between sophomore, junior and senior years in the academic experience. However, it differs in two fundamental ways: First, when we say multi-disciplinary we mean that within the relatively broad areas of Electrical and Computer Engineering. (ECE includes: computer engineering, controls, electrophysics, microelectronics, communications.) Second, rather than teams that are comprised of students of the same academic class, each year our capstone design course will involve students from the sophomore through the senior years. Seniors will enroll in a two-semester Capstone course, which provides detailed design theory and professional quality projects. Juniors will interact with senior students to perform analysis of specific aspects of the projects, and will also attend seminars concerning issues they will confront as modern engineers. Sophomores and juniors will have the opportunity to attend lectures, and will attend the presentations given by seniors on their team projects. By involving the underclassmen in the Capstone courses we hope to demonstrate to them the relevance (and importance) of the course work they are involved in at the sophomore and junior levels, as well as to prepare them for the intense team experience they will meet as seniors in the Capstone program. A flow chart highlighting the general structure of our curriculum revision plan is given in Figure 1.
Figure 1: Schematic diagram indicating how Sophomores and Juniors, as well as Seniors will participate in the Capstone experience, and how the outcomes of that experience are used to improve the curriculum.
II. Overview of Proposed Curriculum Revision Plan
II.1 Proposed Capstone Curriculum Revision Plan
Specifics of the Capstone experience are described below according to the academic years.
Senior Year
The Capstone experience will consist of two general classes: Capstone I and Capstone II, which will take place in the first and second terms, respectively.
First Term: Students will complete Capstone I, a lecture and project class within a specific discipline of ECE. Capstone I courses will be very similar to the present one-term Capstone courses now offered. The lecture component of this course will bring together many of the topics students learned in their freshman through junior years, but will emphasize a major subsection of ECE. For example, students may take a Capstone I class in Mixed Signal VLSI Design (one of seven Capstone courses presently offered). While such a course touches on many ECE disciplines, it draws largely from the sub-discipline of microelectronics. As another example, students may take a first semester course in communications where they work on projects implementing basic communication modulation schemes on a DSP chip.
Second Term: All students will complete Capstone II, which consists of a symposium and a multi-disciplinary major design project. At the beginning of Capstone II, there will be a first major symposium where students will present the team projects from Capstone I to all their peers. Then, with the assistance of the faculty, they will form new interdisciplinary teams comprised of students from two or more of the previous classes. The Capstone II teams will then propose and implement projects derived from their work in Capstone I. Progress will be monitored not only by the faculty advisor for each team, but also through the bi-weekly student presentations to their peers. At the end of Capstone II, a second major symposium will be held where students will make oral presentations of their projects. Students will also be required to have poster presentations; the posters will provide further opportunity for the students to discuss their projects with their peers and faculty.
Role of Juniors and Sophomores
Underclassmen—sophomores and juniors—will be brought into the Capstone design experience as described below. The reasons for doing this are: to give them an early look at team design work at a professional level; to show them the relevance of the sophomore and junior curricula to their later work; to enable the seniors to mentor them; to give them an opportunity to be challenged by attacking problems (with faculty guidance) for which they have not yet been formally trained.
Sophomores will be brought into the Capstone experience in Capstone II. The purpose of this is to introduce them to interdisciplinary research and enable them to see how engineering teams work. This will be done by having them attend the lectures and biweekly senior team presentations. We hope this will also give them a broader perspective on the field. In addition, and importantly, their ECE curriculum will be putinto context as they begin to observe how the information they learn in the sophomore and junior years is used in design projects.
Juniors will be involved in two fundamental ways, involving lectures and analytical work. In the first term, juniors will analyze the Capstone I projects the seniors have chosen, under the supervision of Capstone faculty and in cooperation with the seniors. This will both provide continuity and give them an opportunity to test their skills on new, harder problems than they will have had heretofore. We believe this will be an excellent learning experience because we have found that it is often possible for students, with appropriate guidance from faculty, to gain knowledge in specific aspects of a technical discipline without having a broad theoretical base in the area of interest (“learning by doing”)[2].
In the second term (Capstone II), juniors will be required to analyze aspects of the more complicated, multidisciplinary senior projects, again under the guidance of faculty and working with the senior students whose projects they are analyzing. In addition, they will be required to attend the biweekly student presentations of the senior students on the progress of their work. This will reinforce the introduction to team-based research they received as sophomores, and will also help to prepare them for choosing a sub-discipline of ECE in which they may want to concentrate. An additional benefit is that we have found that students often learn quickly when working with upperclassmen, who can serve as mentors.
We believe that this analysis work is very important pedagogically. For example, we have found that students can analyze simple operational amplifier circuits without having a broad background in electronics; they simply learn what they need for the specific project[2]. This is the opposite of the typical pedagogical approach, where a comprehensive, mathematically based background is provided before we encourage students to reach out on their own. However, if students are required to analyze a specific project, for which they may not have yet acquired all the background in their previous class-work, then they are highly likely to educate themselves to the extent necessary to that required by the project. This takes advantage of learning styles which are not usually emphasized in engineering by giving students more of an opportunity to learn through self-experimentation, instead of merely assimilating the knowledge to which they are directed [3]. In addition, it will automatically define the limits of the educational experience, and thus the practical time constraints. We will not ask juniors to perform design tasks, since this usually requires broader knowledge. However, analysis of specific existing designs will give underclassmen an idea of what the design process is, and what they will have to learn in order to be successful at it. An important goal is to teach students to be independent and to be able to learn on their own.
II.2 Proposed Overall Curriculum Revision Plan
With the Capstone program in place, we will turn our attention to reviewing and revising the other components of the curriculum. We have a tentative plan to reduce the number of required credits and allow for an increased number of electives to achieve a more flexible curriculum that helps students meet the multidisciplinary requirements of modern engineering. This required credit reduction will necessitate careful analysis to determine what is essential to the ECE education process, what can be left as an elective, and what can be eliminated from the formal curriculum. While these decisions will require detailed research, we will use our revised Capstone program as a key source of data for making these decisions by evaluating how the present curriculum has affected students’ ability to perform Capstone work.
We expect that the final Capstone II design projects will be of professional quality. These projects will have drawn from many disciplines. The content, information, and technologies required to achieve these final projects will in themselves indicate what skills the students require in order to perform engineering at the professional level. In other words, since we expect the Capstone II final projects to represent microcosms of real-world engineering, the projects themselves will provide information as to what highly successful engineers need to know. By analyzing the skill set that was necessary to produce the most successful projects, and by analyzing students’ performance in the Capstone I courses, we will know what material to emphasize in the general curriculum. Of course, not all the basics will explicitly be represented in the Capstone projects, so care must be taken to use other sources as well, including what we expect future trends to be. However, since Capstone II is multidisciplinary in the sense of combining students from different Capstone I experiences, we will have a broader gauge to assess student performance than if single Capstone courses were used, as is the present case.
As a first step in achieving a more modern, flexible curriculum, we plan to develop a new freshman course to introduce students to what electrical engineering is. The intent is to whet their interest and to teach some basic intuitive skills (for example, we will try to instill a basic feel of how simple circuits work. As another example, we will show students how they can use a computer program such as PSPICE to model a circuit, and then realize this circuit and test it). We have real data based on our experience with local high school students that designing and building simple electronics is possible and is a powerful teaching tool [2].
For the sophomore and junior year curricula, we plan to examine reducing the number of required Electromagnetic Theory credits from six to four and reducing the number of required Transistor Electronics and Semiconductor Physics credits from eight to six. The Capstone program, along with projections of future engineering trends, will help us to determine how to streamline these courses with minimal sacrifice of relevant material. To help compensate for these reductions in the curricula, we plan to explore the idea of requiring students to take a physics-based ECE course for one of their upper level technical electives. Furthermore, we will ensure that one of these electives is Nanotechnology. Finally, we will strengthen the requirements for mathematics and physics in the first three terms (freshman and sophomore years).
III. Background
Investigations of the curricula of other universities [4-6] and study of the ABET 2000 requirements have provided us with directions on how to improve the curriculum of our ECE department. However, a key feature of our process is that we will begin curriculum revision with our current, one-semester Capstone design classes, which will be revised to form the Capstone I component of the new curriculum. This is because the driving force for revision of our curriculum as a whole will be the assessment of the Capstone course outcomes that represent a culmination of the results of the entire ECE program. Therefore, the Capstone courses need to be revised in such a way that they not only provide an improved team research experience for the students, but also provide us with metrics of the health of the whole ECE curriculum. We hope that this salient feature of our revision plan at the University of Maryland will be a model that will benefit other universities as well.
We will use our existing, one-semester Capstone courses as a starting point for the new program. Currently, students take a single, 3-credit lecture/laboratory class that contains design projects to satisfy their Capstone requirements. This is essentially equivalent to what we called Capstone I, above. While these classes have been reviewed favorably by ABET, they are limited to one semester, and we believe that they do not provide students with sufficient design experience. However, when combined with a larger capstone program, these classes would form a solid basis for the first semester lecture/lab classes of the senior year capstone experience. Then, by bringing the sophomore and junior students into the Capstone experience we will give the underclassmen a “jump-start” on the team design process, as well as generate more data for improvement of the lower curriculum. Below we give a summary of the existing, first semester Capstone classes.
Mixed Signal VLSI Design:
The course gives students a practical knowledge of how to design and fabricate integrated circuits based on modern ubiquitous Complementary Metal Oxide Silicon (CMOS) devices. Students will learn how to actually design an analog, digital or mixed signal circuit, lay it out and transform it into a real chip. The course relies heavily on CAD tools for circuit simulation and circuit layout. Final projects are required, which are the design of a complete chip in a format ready to be submitted to MOSIS for fabrication.
CAD of Digital VLSI Systems:
This course is an introduction to VLSI design. Although the emphasis is on digital VLSI circuits, an initial overview of the analog basis of digital VLSI circuits is given. Using a state-of-the-art CAD environment provided by CADENCE Design Systems, the students design combinational and sequential circuits at various levels of abstraction. First a brief discussion of the device physics of MOSFETs is presented. Next, CMOS circuits are used to construct a digital primitive. These circuits are analyzed using hand calculations and SPICE/SPECTRE simulations. Subsequently, the integration of these primitives using the SCMOS design rules provided by MOSIS is discussed. A brief overview of the fabrication steps and justifications for the rules is also provided. Schematic versus layout verification and SPICE simulation is used to confirm the integrity of the mask layout. Next the behavioral abstraction of the circuits using VERILOG HDL is developed. The behavioral model includes the effects of the parasitic components encountered in the layout process. Students use the behavioral models to help develop their projects.