About ELEC 241

ELEC 241: Fundamentals of Electrical Engineering I
Instructor: Don H. Johnson, Duncan Hall 2095, dhj@rice.edu, X4956

Course Overview

  • Class meets MWF, 11AM, Duncan Hall 1070
  • Instructor Office Hours: Thursdays 1-5 PM, Duncan Hall 2095; by appointment, (almost) anytime.
  • Online version of the course can be found here.
  • Required Text: Johnson, Fundamentals of Electrical Engineering I

The course’s objectives are to provide, through homework and tutorials, the technical foundations for succeeding courses in electrical engineering and, through the accompanying laboratory, ELEC 240, the practical foundations.
Prerequisites: Math 101 (or 105) and Math 102 (or 106). Co-requisite: ELEC 240.

Course Outline

  1. Elements of signal and system theory
    • Digital and analog information
    • Block diagrams: sources, systems, sinks
  2. Signal and system analysis
    • Analog signal processing
      • Signal theory: time-domain concepts of amplitude, delay, superposition
      • Representation of signals by electronic quantities (electric, optical)
      • Elementary circuit theory
        • Circuit laws; series and parallel configurations
        • Power dissipation
        • Equivalent circuits
        • Impedance
        • Basic analog circuit building block: the op-amp
      • Signals in the frequency domain
        • Fourier series; signal decomposition; notion of bandwidth
        • Fourier transforms: bandwidth, filtering, modulation
        • The speech signal
        • Sampling theorem
      • Signals in the time domain
        • Impulses and impulse response
        • Convolution
    • Digital signal processing
      • A/D conversion; amplitude quantization; data rate
      • DTFT, DFT, FFT, digital filters, spectrograms
      • Speech signal processing
    • Information Processing
      • Developing information processing algorithms using matrices
      • Deriving algorithms that minimize an error criterion
      • Supervised learning and classification algorithms
  3. Digital Information Transmission
    • Entropy and Shannon’s Coding Theorem
    • Lossless and lossy compression; redundancy
    • Channel coding; error correcting codes; transmission rate
    • Capacity; Shannon’s Noisy Channel Coding Theorem

Course Objectives

  1. Mathematically describe and manipulate complex exponential signals and linear, time-invariant systems that operate on them;
  2. Apply Kirchhoff’s Laws, equivalent circuit models, and transfer functions to analyze voltage and current relationships in passive circuits;
  3. Apply formal node analysis to analyze the operation of basic op-amp circuits;
  4. Use Fourier series representation of periodic signals to perform frequency domain analysis of linear time-invariant systems;
  5. Apply properties of the Fourier transform to signal analysis;
  6. Develop a time-domain view of signals and systems;
  7. Show how to covert analog signals into digital signals;
  8. Analyze the behavior of digital systems on discrete-time signals using the Discrete-Time Fourier Transform (DTFT);
  9. Calculate the complexity of implementing discrete-time filtering using the Fast Fourier Transform; describe and analyze discrete-time filtering of analog signals;
  10. Introduce data science notions of developing information processing algorithms without models;
  11. Construct simple source compression codes and error-correcting codes, and explain their application in digital communication of information;
  12. Use Shannon’s Source Coding and Channel Capacity Theorems to show how error-free communication becomes possible.

This is the first course in a two course sequence, the second being ELEC 242 taught in the spring semester.

University Disability Accommodation Policy

Any student with a documented disability needing academic adjustments or accommodations is requested to speak with the course instructor during the first two weeks of class. All discussions will remain confidential. If you have a documented disability that may affect academic performance, you should: 1) make sure this documentation is on file with Disability Resource Center (Allen Center, Room 111 / adarice@rice.edu / x5841) to determine the accommodations you need and 2) meet with the instructor to discuss your accommodation needs.