EE 16B | Designing Information Devices and Systems II
Fall 2015
Calendar
Course Staff
Instructors
Course Co-Developer
GSIs
Readers/Lab Assistants
Resources
Lecture Videos
DFT
EE20 textbook (Lee & Varaiya)EE20 lecture notes (see especially lectures 1-9)
DFT Lecture from EE120 (lecture 9)
Textbook chapter on DFT (starts on page 57 - ignore the DTFT, it is different!)
Interactive guide to the DFT
Another textbook chapter (starts on page 144)
Some EE20 practice problems (with solutions)
PCA, SVD
A tutorial on PCAA linear algebra review that concludes with SVD
An article about SVD and its applications
Digital Circuits and First-Order DEs
An overview of Boolean algebraEE141 lecture notes and videos (in particular, see Lecture 3)
Several good textbooks:
- Digital Design and Computer Architecture, Harris and Harris
- CMOS VLSI Design, Weste and Harris
- Digital Integrated Circuits, Rabaey, Chandrakasan, and Nikolic
Two examples of first-order DEs applied to circuits
Sampling and Aliasing
Lecture notes from the University of ColoradoEE120 lecture notes 1 and 2
Lee and Varaiya (see page 475)
Oppenheim (see PDF page 259, book page 513)
Frequency Response and Impedance
EE20 Textbook (Lee & Varaiya) (see Sections 8.1 and 8.2)EE20 Notes
EE40 Notes
EE40 Lectures
Controls
Murray and AstromFranklin, Powell, and Workman
Homework Party
Every week there will be a "homework party." This is completely optional. GSIs will be present in shifts as will some readers. Students are expected to help each other out, and if desired, form ad-hoc "pickup" homework groups in the style of a pickup basketball game.
Homework Grading
The primary way that the homework will be graded is by yourselves. Solutions will be posted online and then you will be expected to read them and enter your own scores and comments for every problem in the homework on a simple coarse scale:
0 = didn't attempt or very very wrong,
2 = off in the wrong direction or no clear direction,
5 = right direction and got half-way there,
8 = mostly right but a few minor things missing or wrong,
10 = 100% correct.
Your grades will be due the Monday after the homework deadline and if you don't enter any grades by the deadline, you are giving yourself a zero on that assignment. Note: all partial credit must be justified with a comment.
Just like we encourage you to use a study group for doing your homework, we strongly encourage you to have others help you in grading your assignments while you help grade theirs. This will also help you avoid self-favoritism.
The readers are going to grading and so we will catch any attempts at trying to inflate your own scores. This will be considered cheating and is definitely not worth the risk.
If you have any questions, please ask on Piazza.
Extra credit will be available for many creative activities including helping us debug issues with the class and coming up with constructive solutions. (For example: creating practice problems with solutions, providing patches to bugs in labs and homeworks, etc...) Talk with your GSI in person or post on Piazza if you want to get feedback from the entire class.
Course Communication
The instructors and TA will post announcements, clarifications, hints, etc. on Piazza. Hence you must check the EE16a Piazza page frequently throughout the term. (You should already have access to the EE16a Spring 2015 forum. If you do not, please let us know.) If you have a question, your best option is to post a message there. The staff (instructors and TAs) will check the forum regularly, and if you use the forum, other students will be able to help you too. When using the forum, please avoid off-topic discussions, and please do not post answers to homework questions before the homework is due.
If your question is personal or not of interest to other students, you may mark your question as private on Piazza, so only the instructors will see it. If you wish to talk with one of us individually, you are welcome to come to our office hours. Please reserve email for the questions you can't get answered in office hours, in discussion sections, or through the forum.
It can be challenging for the instructors to gauge how smoothly the class is going. We always welcome any feedback on what we could be doing better. If you would like to send anonymous comments or criticisms, please feel free to use an anonymous remailer like this one to avoid revealing your identity.
Collaboration
You are encouraged to work on homework problems in study groups of two to four people; however, you must always write up the solutions on your own. Similarly, you may use books or online resources to help solve homework problems, but you must always credit all such sources in your writeup and you must never copy material verbatim. We believe that most students can distinguish between helping other students and cheating. Explaining the meaning of a question, discussing a way of approaching a solution, or collaboratively exploring how to solve a problem within your group is an interaction that we strongly encourage. But you should write your homework solution strictly by yourself so that your hands and eyes can help you internalize this material.You should acknowledge everyone whom you have worked with or who has given you any significant ideas about the homework. This is good scholarly conduct.
Don't Be Afraid to Ask for Help
Are you struggling? Please come talk to us We would much rather deal with misunderstanding early on, and we can help. Even if you are convinced that you are the only person in the class that doesn't understand the material, and that it is entirely your fault for having fallen behind, please overcome any feelings of guilt and ask for help as soon as you need it -- we can almost guarantee you're not the only person who feels this way. Don't hesitate to ask us for help -- we really do care that you learn!
Advice
The following tips are offered based on our experience.
Do the homeworks! The homeworks are explicitly designed to help you to learn the material as you go along. Although the numerical weight of the homeworks is not huge, there is usually a strong correlation between homework scores and final grades in the class.
Take part in discussion sections! Discussion sections are not auxiliary lectures. They are an opportunity for interactive learning. The success of a discussion section depends largely on the willingness of students to participate actively in it. As with office hours, the better prepared you are for the discussion, the more you are likely to get out of it.
Form study groups! As stated above, you are encouraged to form small groups (two to four people) to work together on homeworks and on understanding the class material on a regular basis. In addition to being fun, this can save you a lot of time by generating ideas quickly and preventing you from getting hung up on some point or other. Of course, it is your responsibility to ensure that you contribute actively to the group; passive listening will likely not help you much. And recall the caveat above that you must write up your solutions on your own. You are strongly advised you to spend some time on your own thinking about each problem before you meet with your study partners; this way, you will be in a position to compare ideas with your partners, and it will get you in practice for the exams. Make sure you work through all problems yourself. Some groups try to split up the problems ("you do Problem 1, I'll do Problem 2, then we'll swap notes"); not only is this a punishable violation of our collaboration policies, it also ensures you will learn a lot less from this course.
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