Overview:

This is our busiest set of laboratories, in terms of utilization ratio. Its overall needs are versatility and generality, in view of the many basic course needs it serves. In EE 413 students design automated test subsystems and systems using a PC and GPIB laboratory instruments. They learn how to program a PC to act as a GPIB controller, to design, build, and test various subassemblies to augment the instruments, and to acquire and process data.

Current State of the Laboratory:

Thanks to very generous donations from Hewlett-Packard and Agilent Corporations these four lab rooms have recently been completely renovated. This donation included PCs, printers, digital multimeters, digital oscilloscopes, power supplies, and function generators. All these instruments are GPIB-ready allowing them to be accessed via the PC in an integrated fashion.

Improvements to the experimental procedures in a dozen different lab classes are underway. LabVIEW is also available in these labs, and is being used with GPIB-based equipment to automate data acquisition in some experiments.

Equipment Needs:

Thanks to the generous donations from HP and Agilent, the equipment needs for these laboratories are limited:

• Frequency Counter (min 100 MHz)
• HP 4155 Parameter Analyzers
• Keithley 2400 SourceMeters
• Decade boxes for resistors, capacitors.

Above equipment should all have GPIB (IEEE 488.2) support. In addition, we need 4 battery powered DMMs, 1 Digital Inductance/Capacitance bridge