ELEC-E4440 - Microwave Engineering Workshop P, 09.09.2019-20.01.2020

Course Overview

• Course Overview
  

  Course Overview

  
  

  Contact sessions
  

  On Mondays at 12:15 - 14, lectures and seminars are in regular OIH A116 "Seminar Room", whereas PCB workshops and measurements labs are in ELE department, Maarintie 8.
  

  Teacher team

  Univ. Lect. Clemens Icheln, Sen. Univ. Lect. Juha Mallat, and Riku Kormilainen as course assistant.
  

  Pre-requisites

  This course requires students to have passed both ELEC-E4420 and ELEC-E4430 in order to achieve the learning goals of this course with the given workload allocation corresponding to 5 ECTS. Lack of pre-requisites means a student needs to independently study more in order to pass this course (see The basics section).
  

  Learning outcomes

  • After the course, an average student (grade 3) can outline the basic operation of generic microwave electronic circuits, design practical microwave electronic circuits for a given desired functionality, analyse the basic factors that affect the performance of microwave circuits, and test experimentally the performance of a given or any own microwave circuit/device.
    

  • Students will have had the opportunity to improve their presentation skills, group-working skills, documentation skills, and problem solving skills.   

  Course literature

  see separate Course books section

  Course content

  1. System-level design and evaluation of microwave devices, also considering noise and non-linearity.
  • Design of active microwave circuits such as a radio transceiver, as well as experimental evaluation of a prototype, including basic network analysis (i.e. of scattering-parameters) through vector-network-analyser (VNA) measurements.
    
  2. Microwave measurement metrology, for spectrum analysis, network analysis, power and noise measurements, and other applications.

  Principles of the teaching

  • We will use the "flipped classroom" principle, i.e. you read the book chapters before they are handled in class and there will be online quizzes at the beginning of some of the lessons to verify how well students understood the book chapter, followed by discussions.
    
  • The course consists of 5 main topics, including the final project: see the subpages of each topic. Each subpage contains lecture slides and some background material.
    

  Workload

  • 5 ECTS ⇔ 5 x 27 hours = 135 hours of working
    
  • 15 x 2 hours = 30 hours of contact teaching ⇔ 2 hours per week
    
  • 50 hours of independent studies,  average 2-3 hours per week
  • 55 hours of project work,  average 3 hours per week
    
  • The given number of hours for students' work is only indicative. It is subject to e.g. pre-knowledge and skills of a student (see pre-requisites).

  Communication and news
  

  • The main forums for the communication and information are the contact sessions and the top-level News forum on this MyCourses course page. Registered students get these news as an e-mail. All important information will be published in the News forum. 

    The students' questions should be addressed during the lessons or in the general discussion forum in MyCourses. This is because the same question is very likely interesting for the other students, too!
    

    If you have a personal question that you cannot ask during lessons, you can send an e-mail to one of the teachers. 

  Assessment

  The course is graded 0-5, based on the following assessment methods (for each "sub-grade", the weight in the final course grade is given in %). There are no compulsory parts. There is no make-up exam nor any additional assessment possibility!
  

  • Lesson tests (35 %): Students take four lesson tests/quizzes distributed over the course duration. One lesson test take approximately 40 minutes. Presence in class is required to have the online quizzes fully graded. The three best results will be counted into this sub-grade (so you can skip/fail one lesson test without affecting your chances for the best possible total "lesson-tests" grade).
    

  • Project work (50 %): Related to the project, students return three learning diaries that are assessed (10%). An intermediate project seminar along with the final project presentation contribute to this sub-grade (40%) .
    

  • Final quiz (15%): The final quiz at the end of the course follows the same online format as lesson tests but is a bit more extensive. The aim is to assess students' overall comprehension of the course contents.