ECE 201

Honor Code and Exam Policy

All students are expected to abide by the George Mason University Honor Code. Sharing of ideas and comparison of answers on homework is acceptable and encouraged, but copied work will not be accepted. All tests and the final exam will be closed book and closed notes unless specifically stated otherwise by the Instructor. All work must be your own. Any reasonable suspicion of an honor violation will be reported.

Students must arrive in class within 15 minutes of the scheduled starting time for all tests and exams. Students arriving later than 15 minutes after the scheduled starting time will not be allowed to take the test/exam and will receive a grade of 0 for the test/exam.

Objectives:

Introduce the students to some of the major concepts in electrical engineering, such as frequency response and sampling.
Introduce the students to methods of engineering problem solving through the use of powerful software tools.
Introduce the students to some important mathematical tools that will be used in many of their subsequent courses in electrical engineering.

Grading:

Late homework will not be accepted. The two lowest homework grades will be dropped when determining a student's homework grade. The higher test grade will count 60% of the test average, and the lower test grade will count 40% of the test average.

Important Dates:

Test 1 -- Wednesday, October 4, Chapters 1 and 2 and MATLAB
Test 2 -- Monday, November 13, Chapter 3 and MATLAB
Final Exam -- Monday, December 18, 1:30 p.m. - 4:15 p.m., Comprehensive, Chapters 4 and 5 emphasized.
Last day to drop classes without Dean's permission -- Friday, September 29.
No Class October 9 due to Columbus Day Recess!! (Monday lab sections meet on Wednesday October 11 that week.)

Course Outline:

Chapter 1 -- Introduction, overview and outline of the course, signals and systems -- their definitions and mathematical representations.

MATLAB overview -- The syntax of commands in MATLAB, common MATLAB commands, writing functions and scripts.

Chapter 2 -- Complex numbers and complex arithmetic, sinusoidal signals, relationships between the time and frequency domains, graphical representations of signals.

Chapter 3 -- Frequency spectrum of a signal, graphical methods for representing the spectrum, combinations of sinusoids, creating non-sinusoidal signals from sinusoids, the Fourier series.

Chapter 4 -- Converting continuous-time signals to discrete-time, the sampling process, the effect of sampling too slowly, fundamental limitations on sampling, the frequency spectrum of a sampled signal, converting discrete-time signals back to continuous-time, ideal interpolation.

Chapter 5 -- Systems that operate in discrete time, the Finite Impulse Response (FIR) filter, an example of FIR filtering, building blocks for implementing FIR filters, linear time-invariant (LTI) systems.

Labs -- All Lab sections will meet in Sci & Tech II, Room 133. The Lab experiments are designed and intended to complement the material presented in class in order to strengthen the students' understanding of the material. Students are expected to be well prepared when they come to the Lab in order to make the most efficient use of their time.

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Lastest revision on Thursday, June 8, 2006 6:45 PM