I finished the logo for the Engineering Physics summer clothing order 2007.

Piranha is a 3:1 mixture of sulphuric acid (H₂SO₄) and Hydrogen Peroxide (H₂O₂), used for cleaning organic deposits in the nanofab, the UofA’s microfabrication facility. It is also , of course, the name of a flesh eating fish found in the Amazon river basin. For more information or to order clothing check out this document.

As the EE 323 grades finally made their way out of the Dean’s office (where Rob and I both agree they must have been tied up) semester 6 of 8 officially draws to a close. While it was not the most successful one to date, it was good enough to leave me in what I consider good shape coming out of 3 years of this thing they call undergrad.

Luckily last semester carried a few more labs that boosted the total credit earned up by 0.8 engineering course units over the second semester of third year. That combined with last semester’s almost spotless set of numbers… well let’s just say it keeps me just above that beautiful threshold they call 0.05 which allows me to round up instead of down when calculating the GPA. I’ll admit it’s a pretty sad tale when I’m figuring out those kinds of things but you need something to try and calculate when you’re biking in the rain. What else did I calculate you might ask? Well… I’m still above a 4.0 if I do the calculations factoring all the “+” marks as a bonus 0.3 grade points.

I was well pleased by the stellar lab report mark I sucked out of the last 397 project. While the system is designed to wreak havoc on the self esteem of everyone in engineering physics and honors physics programs, I feel like I won a tiny battle with the last project. Isn’t that what it’s about? I won the battle even though they won the war?? Oh well, so it isn’t quite that way but when you deal with “a personality” such as the one we all had to deal with it’s enough to leave me feeling alright about it.

Jeremy Sit jumps ship on his beloved EE 350 class the week before the final exam leaving us to fend for ourselves up here is freezing cold northern Alberta. And what is he doing?? “Spring Conference of the Materials Research Society” my arse. What Sit was actually doing down there in San Fransisco doesn’t seem to be studious at all.

The Tech elective I’ve chosen for the fourth year of my program are:

• EE 380: Microprocessors Microcomputer architecture, assembly language programming, sub-routine handling, memory and input/output system and interrupt concepts.
• EE 470: Waveguides Distributed circuits, propagation and radiation of energy. Transient and time harmonic signals in transmission lines, including impedance matching. Microwave and optical waveguides.
• PHYS 472: Quantum Mechanics B Review of the postulates of quantum mechanics; quantization of angular momentum; matrix representations, spin and parity; approximation methods; perturbation theory; variational and other methods; applications; scattering theory; systems of identical particles.
• EE 456: Nanoelectronics Fundamental concepts related to current flow in nanoelectronic devices. Energy level diagram and the Fermi function. Single-energy-level model for current flow and associated effects, such as the quantum of conductance, Coulomb blockade, and single electron charging. The Schroedinger equation and quantum mechanics for applications in nanoelectronics. Matrix-equation approach for numerical band structure calculations of transistor channel materials. k-space, Brillouin zones, and density of states. Subbands for quantum wells, wires, dots, and carbon nanotubes. Current flow in nanowires and ballistic nanotransistors, including minimum possible channel resistance, quantum capacitance, and the transistor equivalent circuit under ballistic operation.
• EE 351: Digital Electronics MOS digital circuits, logic gates, threshold voltages. MOS logic families: design and simulation. CMOS timing: propagation delay, rise and fall times. Storage elements, memory, I/O and interfacing.

I’m not choosing the easiest way to get through fourth year, Quantum is going to be a decent time investment, and picking EE351 and EE 470 require having labs when I could get away with choosing one of those courses to have no lab. I think it’s important to keep my feet wet in as many areas as I can so I’m pursuing a range of tech electives rather than aiming at taking all the photonics courses I can, or doing something like hitting all the courses in the IC design series. It’s also worth noting that I’m not registering for EE457, microfabrication. I have some experience on that topic and will get a bit more this coming summer, for that reason I’ll direct my focus elsewhere. If I want to pursue it in grad school I’m not getting all that far behind anyways.

I’m on the 10 person short list for the Atco electric scholarship. This means that next Tuesday is highlighted by a 45 minute interview downtown Edmonton to convince a panel that they need to select me as the recipient…

Value: $5,000

Conditions: To be awarded annually to Canadian Citizens or Permanent Residents with satisfactory academic standing entering the third year of Electrical or Mechanical Engineering. Recipients will be selected on the basis of academic standing, well-rounded personality, interpersonal skills, and leadership potential as demonstrated through involvement in extracurricular activities.

Donor: Endowed in 1987 by Alberta Power Limited (now ATCO Electric) to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the creation of engineering as an organized profession. ATCO Electric will try to offer summer employment to the finalists in each competition.

Andrew and I spent a bonus 3.5 hours sitting in the 350 lab today working on our audio amplifier and it seems that we did nail it in the end. Our power amplification is well above the 1 million times specified in the manual. In fact, we pretty much maxed it out. Instead of doing like EE 340 where I figured out everything before I did it we decided to go for it and start building amplifier stages with the hopes that we could just tweak them into working correctly rather than actually calculating everything properly.

We started out by asking for maximum amplification from out MOSFET and found that we could get a voltage amplification of about 30 from it. Because it was impossible to drive our 8 Ohm speaker directly from the output of the amp we needed to put it through a BJT amplifier with a bit more reasonable of an output impedance. Anyhow, maximum power called for approximately 860 Ohms resistance on the drain of the FET, and this drove the BJT into clipping rather severly. Our simple solution to the problem was to decrease the amount of signal being coupled into the BJT by decreasing the efficiency of the FET, what started at 860 quickly became 560, then 480, 360, 240 and finally 150 Ohms. This amounted to a signal just clear of the level of clipping onset. And left us with well more than power amplification of 60dB.

Another curious note which we didn’t understand immediately, but soon got a handle on as everyone else in the lab was running into the same problem was a massive drift in power gain. It turns out to be no surprise at all that when a 100uF cap is in series with approximately 500K your time constant is a whopping 50 seconds! So evenif you let the circuit “warm up” for a minute you’ve still got a fractional drift of ~1/e to deal with after 2 minutes (1/e)^2 etc… Based on PSpice simulation I can drop that capacitance by a factor of 10 (or even 100) and not lose any bandwidth so it shouldn’t be a problem in the future (Time constant is 5 seconds (or 0.5)), just a funny story.

I figured it wouldn’t hurt to fill in the details regarding semester 6/8. my courses this semester consist of…

• EE 350 – Electronic devices, Instructor Jeremy Sit
• ENGG 405 – Engingeering Management Instructor Peter Flynn
• EE 323 – Partial Differential Equations Instructor Vien Van
• PHYS 381 – Electrodynamics Instructor Zbigniew Gortel
• PHYS 371 – Quantum Mechanics A Instructor Frank Marsiglio
• PHYS 397 – Projects in Experimental Physics Instructor Kim Chow

Things are looking busy but thus far not impossible. Engineering Management is something I know I will find harder than the average person, we’ll see how it goes. If I keep on top of things I should be in good shape. I guess that’s the situation for all of my classes, but staying on top of things gets tough when I have to write those big lab reports (one of which I picked up today – 89% woo hoo)