The undergraduate ECE Program includes an Approved ECE Design Elective.  This course is normally taken during Senior year, but is open to Juniors who have senior status (completed at least 22 semester course credits toward the BSE degree, including credited AP and IB courses) by the time the ECE Design Course is taken.  This "capstone design course" involves multidisciplinary teams of students who build and test custom designed systems, components or engineering processes. Students gain experience in the design/building/testing/demonstration processes intrinsic to engineering design as practiced by engineering graduates,

Requirements for the team project include:

• a design plan incorporating engineering standards and realistic constraints,
• a timeline indicating project milestones,
• a written project report including an assessment of the results,and
• oral presentations to the class.

The completed project assessment must include most of the following elements:

• cost,
• environmental impact,
• manufacturability,
• ethics,
• health and safety,and likely
• social and political impacts.

Example Senior Design Projects:

Dynamic 16-bit Carry-LookaheadAdder/Subtractor - Team: Jason Bosko, John Choi and Paul Verheggen. The carry-lookahead is a fast adder designed to minimize the delay caused by carry propagation in basic adders. It utilizes the fact that, at each bit position in the addition, it can be determined if a carry with be generated at that bit, or if a carry will be propagated through that bit. We have used domino logic for improved performance. Download presentation

Simplified Data Encryption Standard (SDES Algorithm) - Team: Kalavati Bhashyam, Amrita Halapannavar, Mustafa Lokhandwala. The team nearly halved their transistor count by adopting the NOR ROM architecture for the memory and decoder. Download presentation.

DES Coprocessor - Team: Matt Johnson, Andrew Waterman, Gareth Guvanasen and Pat Eibl. The team improved the Data Encryption Standard (DES) by making the encryption more complex and less susceptible to hacking. Download presentation.

Fault Tolerant Barrel Shifter (VLSI) - Team: Harshad Aherao, Bhavesh Mehta, Sharon Smith and Shawn Smith. The team overcame the following challenges in their project: Mentor Graphics tool and OS issues, memory issues (quota exceeded issues), sharing and merging design complexities, latch outputs being inadvertently inverted, inputs into/out of Stage 2 being swapped (14 LVS errors), determining most efficient mux design, and using two phase clocks. Download presentation.

Combination Door Lock - Team: Chris Gregory, Archana Ramamoorthy, Viresh Thusu and Andrew Wang. This team developed a combination door lock with the following features: use with multiple users with different password, protection for each user, user friendly indicators using LEDs, time out for incorrect entries, external programmability and eExternal display to show invalid/valid entry. Donwload presentation.

CMOS VLSI Design Methodologies for a Vending Machine - Team: Yuling Zhang, Zhe Chen, Yayuan Zhang and Yanni Zhang. This team developed architectural design of a Vending Machine in terms of schematics and layout, operation of the whole system and its components. Area, power and critical time are estimated. We give the functional description of the system form an assumed “customer.” We used Verilog-HDL to verify the function of each blocks and Mentor IC studio to draw the gate level design and finish to analog simulation. We used IC station to draw the transistor level hardware design of the system. Download presentation.