Title:	ECE 4900 - Senior Thesis I, Fall 2009
Instructor:	Ken Stevens, kstevens@ece.utah.edu, MEB 4506, 585-9176
Classes:	Thu 5:30 - 6:30, MEB-3235
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	Introduction, Organization, Logistics, Expectations, MEB-3235
Aug 27	Teamwork lecture
Sep 3	Project Management lecture.
Sep 10	Anatomy of a Proposal lecture.
Sep 17	3:30-6:00pm Meeting with Tim Hollis from Micron. Meet in ECE Conference room.
Sep 24	Writing Good Proposals lecture.
Sep 29	Technical Q&A on Tim's visit and Micron Proposal
Oct 8	Followup and discussion on Synopsys HSIMPlus
TBD	Continued technical meetings on on-chip noise and proposal.
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

The Micron Proposal that Tim Hollis gave us to help define our 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.

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

Project planning notes

Project Management foils.

Anatomy of a Proposal foils.

Writing Good Proposals foils.

Teamwork foils.

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:

2008-2009:

• 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. Greg Bray, Jeff Gorton, Jonathan Morgan, Kyle Stewart, Garrett Thomas.

• NAND Flash failure behavior beyond SLC Specifications. David Chu, Jeremy Hamblin, Robert Wells, and Roger White.
• Project Sharc: Digital Signal Audio Processing. Leo Asku

• Brandon Bartosh. Remote Monitoring and Control for Ozone Generator
• Clint Brown. Computer Chip Cooling System using Parallel Microchannels
• Michael Chambers. Design and Fabrication of a Microheater Control System
• John Davis. Interactive Slow and Ultra-Luminescence Light Exhibit for Leonardo Science Museum at Library Square
• Justin Horn, James Hu, and Bryce Orgill. Capturing High Quality Video