Hardware Fundamentals
This is the homepage for the hardware fundamentals course. You can find all course information for 2024/2025 here.
Course description
This course is for students with a Bachelor in Computer Science (or equivalent) who joined the CESE Master program. The main goals of the course are as follows. First, to "remove the magic" about field-effect transistors and CMOS logic fabrication and operation. Moreover, we introduce the basics of a modern hardware description language (VERILOG), necessary for some of the folow-up CESE courses. Next, the main advantages and disadvantages of digital signal processing in respect to its analog counterpart will be discussed. Last but not least, the basic principles behind the discrete systems and control theory will be explained based on real-life examples. All in all, the end goal is to equip the CESE students with a Computer Science background with all the necessary knowledge required to successfully specialise in any of the sub-disciplines represented by the research groups delivering the CESE education.
Course Schedule
Here you can find the schedule of the course. Each lecture is denoted by its week and then the first or second lecture of that week. This lecture schedule is also available on Brightspace where it also contains a list of detailed topics per lecture.
| Topic | Date & Time | Location | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lecture 1.1 | Welcome Aboard / Introduction | Tuesday 3 September 13:45 | Drebbelweg-Instruction Room 4 (35.1.170) |
| Lecture 1.2 | The Transistor | Thursday 5 September 08:45 | Drebbelweg-Instruction Room 4 (35.1.170) |
| Lecture 2.1 | CMOS gates, Delay, Power and more | Tuesday 10 September 13:45 | Drebbelweg-Instruction Room 4 (35.1.170) |
| Lecture 2.2 | VERILOG 1 | Thursday 12 September 08:45 | Drebbelweg-Instruction Room 4 (35.1.170) |
| Lab 1 | FET Transistors and CMOS Logic | Thursday 12 September 13:45 | AS-Classroom 12 (22.F.104) |
| Lecture 3.1 | VERILOG 2 | Tuesday 17 September 13:45 | Drebbelweg-Instruction Room 4 (35.1.170) |
| Lecture 3.2 | Signals and systems, Discrete-time systems | Thursday 19 September 08:45 | Drebbelweg-Instruction Room 4 (35.1.170) |
| Lecture 4.1 | Feedback, poles, and fundamental modes, Continuous-time systems | Tuesday 24 September 13:45 | Drebbelweg-Instruction Room 4 (35.1.170) |
| Lecture 4.2 | Z transform, Laplace transform, Discrete approximation of continuous-time systems | Thursday 26 September 08:45 | Drebbelweg-Instruction Room 4 (35.1.170) |
| Lab 2 | Signals and Systems | Thursday 26 September 13:45 | Pulse-Hall 10 (33.A2.600) |
| Lecture 5.1 | Convolution, Frequency response, Feedback and control, Continuous-time frequency response and Bode plots | Tuesday 1 October 13:45 | Drebbelweg-Instruction Room 4 (35.1.170) |
| Lecture 5.2 | Continuous-time feedback and control | Thursday 3 October 08:45 | Drebbelweg-Instruction Room 4 (35.1.170) |
| Lecture 6.1 | Fourier representations, Fourier series, Fourier transform | Tuesday 8 October 13:45 | Drebbelweg-Instruction Room 4 (35.1.170) |
| Lecture 6.2 | Discrete-time frequency representations, Discrete-time Fourier representations | Thursday 10 October 08:45 | Drebbelweg-Instruction Room 4 (35.1.170) |
| Lab 3 | Continuous and Discrete-time Systems | Thursday 10 October 13:45 | Pulse-Hall 10 (33.A2.600) |
| Lecture 7.1 | Relations among Fourier representations, Applications of Fourier transforms | Tuesday 15 October 13:45 | Drebbelweg-Instruction Room 4 (35.1.170) |
| Lecture 7.2 | Sampling and quantization | Thursday 17 October 08:45 | Drebbelweg-Instruction Room 4 (35.1.170) |
| Lecture 8.1 | Digital Control Systems basic concepts | Tuesday 22 October 13:45 | Drebbelweg-Instruction Room 4 (35.1.170) |
| Lecture 8.2 | PID controllers theory design and tunning (advanced topics) | Thursday 24 October 08:45 | Drebbelweg-Instruction Room 4 (35.1.170) |
| Lab 4 | Control Systems | Thursday 24 October 13:45 | Pulse-Hall 10 (33.A2.600) |
| Final Exam | Friday 8 November 9:00 | Pulse-Hall 10 (33.A2.600) |
Grading
The course consists out of a written exam and 4 lab assignments. Each lab assignment is pass/fail and you are required to pass each lab in order to pass the course. A final grade of 6 is needed to pass the course. Each lab also has a bonus assignment which can reward you 0.25 points extra on top of your final grade. For example, if you get a 7 on the exam and you complete 2 bonus assignments during the labs, your final grade is a 7.5.