Mukul Shirvaikar

Introduction of Semiconductor Test Engineering into the BSEE CurriculumAs an increasing number of transistors continue to be fabricated on a single integrated circuit(IC) and the functionality per chip becomes more sophisticated, more efficient test methodsusing advanced automated test equipment (ATE) are required. Semiconductor testing is requiredto ensure that a processing defect has not impaired the functionality of a chip and that the designmeets the required performance specifications. Despite the critical importance of the testengineer, relatively few universities have introduced semiconductor testing into their curriculum.Most test engineers report learning their craft through other means, such as on the job throughco-workers to trial and error1. A recent survey of leaders from the semiconductor industryunderscores the desire for more universities to introduce material into their curriculum that moreclosely reflects the practices of industry, such as test program development2.Our university has partnered with SPEA America, a major manufacturer of ATE, to introducetest engineering into the BSEE curriculum. SPEA has donated to our institution a highperformance semiconductor tester (C340MX). Our faculty along and students are workingclosely in a team with SPEA’s application engineers to develop the required hardware (interfaceelectronics and load board), test scripts, and lab material. In particular, the SPEA engineers havebeen quite helpful in suggesting tests that reflect real world test scenarios.Of the few institutions integrating test engineering into the university curriculum, mostimplement it as one or two courses at the senior level3,4. The results of hands-on laboratories andintroduction of real-world examples through the test engineering classes has shown to result in adeeper understanding and longer retention of the material3. Our approach will be to integrate testengineering at all levels of the curriculum instead of just one senior-level class. In the lower levelclasses, the students will be introduced to simple tests. For this fall semester, we plan tointroduce testing of a resistor (Kelvin and non-Kelvin connection) in a linear circuits class andtesting of a counter in an introductory digital circuits class. The spring semester will introduceop-amp testing into an electronics course and A/D converter testing into a signals and systemsclass. A senior level elective is planned to give those students interesting in test engineering amore comprehensive learning experience with our ATE tester.The rationale behind this graduated approach is to introduce the students as soon as possible toreal world test examples so that they can immediately bridge the gap between academic learningand practical applications from industry. This should reinforce the material learned in lecturesand motivate the students as they realize what they are learning has direct relevance in industry.Surveys of students exposed to our proposed integrative test program and comparisons to acontrol group not exposed to the tester will be used to evaluate the effectiveness of the program.This paper will report on the results from the first semester of this program as well as providingdetails of our three year plan to collaborate with SPEA on integrating test engineering into ourundergraduate curriculum.References [1] Ungar, L.Y., “Test engineering education: a guide to a successful curriculum,” IEEE AUTOTESTCON Proceedings, pp.273-283, 2000. [2] Presentation at the Industry and Academia Roundtable, held at Texas A&M University, May 21, 2010. [3] Hudson, T.A. and Copeland, B., “Working with industry to create a test and product engineering course," IEEE International Conference on Microelectronic Systems Education, MSE '09, pp.130-133, 25-27 July 2009. [4] Flottes, M., et al., “Digital, Memory and Mixed-Signal Test Engineering Education: Five Centres of Competence in Europe” Proceedings of the Second IEEE international Workshop on Electronic Design, Test and Applications, January 28 - 30, 2004.

Laboratory Curriculum Development using Renesas Technology Abstract This paper describes the laboratory curriculum developed for a junior-level introductory course in microprocessors for electrical engineering majors. The Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering (BSEE) curriculum has a required course in microprocessors and the prerequisites are courses in structured programming and digital systems. The laboratory procedures developed for this course are aimed at meeting the learning objectives of this course including assembly language programming, program debugging, serial communication, input/output devices, interrupts, interfacing, and direct memory access (DMA). The laboratory projects introduce students to the host–target environment using an integrated development environment (IDE). The platform currently utilized is a Freescale Semiconductor 68HC11 board produced by Axiom Manufacturing. The 68HC11 is a dated 8-bit architecture and has proved to be a robust platform to teach an introductory course. A new platform is currently being investigated for the microprocessor course partly enabled by an equipment grant from Renesas Inc. The lab projects were developed on the M16C/26A Quick Start Kit (QSK26A) supplied by Renesas Technology. The QSK26A board features on-board-in circuit debugging (ICD) and programming support, eliminating the use for an external ICD unit. The High-performance Embedded Workshop (HEW4) is a powerful real-time source-level debug environment supplied with the QSK26A. Apart from this, the Flash-over USB (FoUSB) programmer software allows in-system programming of the QSK26A board’s M16C/26A Flash MCU. An extensive set of manuals and technical literature is also available for the board. Some of the lab applications implemented in this project were: introduction to the M16C/26A, arithmetic operations, looping, subroutines, logical operations, LCD interface and application development (traffic signals). The lab projects are intended to give students a quick understanding of the instruction set, programming and operation of a microprocessor. A pilot lab is planned in the upcoming academic year.

Back to Basics: A Student-Tutor Matching Program Abstract The College of Engineering and Computer Science of the University of Texas at Tyler recognizes the value of peer-to-peer learning and has in recent years established an engineering “learning community” by reserving sections of freshman and sophomore courses like Calculus, Chemistry and English specifically for engineering students. The goal was that ad hoc alliances and support networks that promote peer-to-peer learning would form within the learning community. However, the learning community approach has well-known limitations. The very best students are typically self-motivated to study and are not consistently involved in the community. The remaining students, including those who most need help, can become “the blind leading the blind.” It is our belief, however, that structured peer-to-peer mentoring can make up the deficiencies learning community. A formalized system for getting more-advanced students in our programs to tutor students in their lower level pre-engineering courses would be very attractive. Such a structured peer-to-peer mentoring and tutoring program, known as the "Back-to-Basics (B2B) Tutoring Program," was launched in fall, 2005 at the University of Texas at Tyler with financial support of the Texas Workforce Development Commission (TWDC). The goal of the focused tutoring program was to provide support for engineering students in the basic areas of sciences, math and programming to help them survive the first two years of the program. The initiative under which B2B was funded by TWDC envisaged increasing the graduation rate of electrical engineers, but students in other engineering disciplines are welcome to use the services of B2B tutors as well. This paper describes the structure and assessment methods of the B2B tutoring and mentoring program and gives preliminary results. Introduction The challenge of engineering education in the United States in the 21st century will be to produce sufficient numbers of qualified engineers from our higher-level educational institutions. This is necessary to keep the nation at the forefront of the technological innovation. In recent years, many engineering schools, including first-tier institutions, have observed a general downturn in enrollment. The student retention rate for the first and second years of engineering programs has been falling. Engineering students must be ready for university-level classes in math, physics, chemistry and computer programming. In an all-too-large percentage of cases, these students are not well prepared in high school for the four-year university programs on which they embark. The problems of recruiting and retaining students adequately prepared for engineering coursework are particularly acute in the region served by the University of Texas at Tyler. The proportion of the population holding baccalaureate degrees in East Texas is below both state and national averages. Based on experience at UT-Tyler, 50% of our entering students eventually drop out due to issues with the above-mentioned courses.

Real Time Systems Laboratory Development Using the TI OMAP Platform Mark Humphries, Mukul Shirvaikar Department of Electrical Engineering University of Texas at Tyler Tyler, TX 75799. Leonardo Estevez Wireless Terminals Business Unit Texas Instruments Inc. Dallas, TX 75243. Abstract The laboratory curriculum developed for a semester long senior-level elective course in Real Time Systems is presented. The projects were developed on the OMAP 5912 starter kit (OSK5912) module supplied by Texas Instruments (TI). Some of the applications covered are: implementing a finite impulse response (FIR) filter and testing with audio, modifying the filter for different band pass characteristics, testing a media codec and implementing an embedded web server. TI expects to disseminate the instructional resources developed and tested in this course to other universities and industry partners. Introduction This paper presents the laboratory curriculum developed for a senior-level elective course in Real Time Systems. The labs developed for this semester long course are aimed at providing a challenging experience to electrical and computer engineering students and exposing them to state-of-the-art tools from industry. The projects were developed on the OMAP 5912 starter kit module supplied by Texas Instruments (TI). The open multimedia architecture platform (OMAP) technology from TI consists mainly of dual-core processor chips 1. The OMAP 5912 chip has an ARM processor and a C55 digital signal processor (DSP) in the same package, a functional block diagram 2 of which is shown in Figure 1. The Linux kernel runs on the ARM processor and the DSP-BIOS kernel runs on the TI C55 DSP in tandem. The real time software development tools for this system are the Code Composer Studio integrated development environment (IDE) and the MontaVista Linux environment. The platform is thus ideally suited to expose students to real time systems. The projects developed cover the following topics sequentially: introduction to the environment, real time operating systems, software development and application debugging 3. Some of the applications covered are: implementing a finite impulse response (FIR) filter and testing with audio, modifying the filter for different band pass characteristics, testing a media Proceedings of the 2005 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright  2005, American Society for Engineering Education

Image Quality assessment (IQA) is a tricky field to master, as it attempts to measure the quality of an image with reference to the complex human visual system. In IQA, there are three dominant strands of research, namely: fullreference, reduced-reference and no-reference image quality assessment. No-reference image quality assessment is the hardest one to achieve, as the reference images required for determining the quality of the given images are not available. In one of our previous papers, we quantified no-reference IQA, using state-of-the-art multitasking neural networks, particularly the VGG-16 and shallow neural networks. We achieved good accuracy for the classification of most distortions. However, one of the drawbacks of the networks used was that the classification accuracy was not good for JPEG2000 compressed images. These images were classified incorrectly as blurry or noisy images. In this paper, we try to classify compressed images more accurately using residual neural networks (ResNets). These deep learning models were built based upon micro-architecture modules and are specific task-focused entities, each one determining the distortion type and distortion level of an artifact present in the image. The test images were obtained from the LIVE II, CSIQ, and TID2013 databases for comparison with previous work. In contrast to our previous approach, where the training was limited to one specific distortion at a time, we train the collection of ResNets with all the possible distortion types present in the test databases. Preprocessing of the images is done using local contrast normalization and global contrast normalization methods. All the hyper-parameters in the ResNets collection, such as activation functions, dropout regularizations, optimizers are tuned to produce optimal classification accuracy. The results are evaluated with different methods such as PLCC, SROCC and MSE and high linear correlation is achieved using the ResNets collection and compared to previous results.