Description
See the Home Page for course description and goals.
Schedule
- Lecture: Tuesday & Thursday, 10:50-12:05; Martel 104
- Laboratory: By arrangement; Ryon B08.
Instructor
- James F. Young, Abercrombie Lab A206, young@rice.edu, x4721.
- Office Hours: By appointment.
Course Text
Photodetection and Measurement, Mark Johnson, McGraw-Hill 2003, ISBN 0-07-140944-0; optional: Photonics Essentials, T. P. Pearsall, McGraw-Hill, 2003, ISBN 0-07-140875-4 (on reserve in Fondren).
Course Style
Approximately 70% of the course will focus on developing photonic laboratory skills. The instructor will review material needed for the laboratory experiments, and demonstrate techniques and equipment in the laboratory. Students, in teams, will perform assigned labs and write laboratory reports. Results and problems will be reviewed and discussed in class. Students may be asked to research particular photonic topics and present their findings to the class. About 30% of the course will focus on design project topics: problem solving, team building, selecting design projects, and initiating the design process. Oral and written reports will document the progress of the design. . Top
Deliverables and Grading:
- Each student will keep a notebook or journal to document their work and thinking in laboratory and on their project. Students will also be asked to reflect on their thinking and learning in the course in their notebook; more information will be provided in class. Notebooks will be inspected early in the course for feedback, and graded at the end of the semester.
- Student laboratory teams will submit a laboratory report for each set of experiments describing their work and results, and answering questions posed in the laboratory. Reports will not be accepted after the due date without prior permission.
- Several reports will be assigned to document your team's engineering design process, such as Design Constraint Table, Design Objectives Table, Design Problem Analysis, Description of Design Concepts, and Design Project Proposal. Some of these will be assigned and graded in ELEC 493, and will also be graded in ELEC 464 for their technical and project merit.
- Laboratory and design reports will constitute the major part of the homework for the course. Additional homework consisting of problems, a task, readings, or a report may be assigned as appropriate to the topic being covered, and will generally be due a week later. The method of grading will vary depending on the assignment and will be explained in advance. Late homework will not be accepted.
- Short in-class quizzes will be given occasionally based on assigned reading, lecture material, or laboratory material. Some may be announced in advance, but I reserve the option to give one at any time.
- Each student must fill out a peer team evaluation assessing the team citizenship and contribution to the team's work of each team member, including themselves. There will be separate evaluations for the laboratory team and for the design team, which will usually be different. The grades for team reports assigned to each team member will be weighted by the combined evaluations. Top
Course Grade:
All requests for reconsideration of graded work must be made within one week after the item is returned. No midterm exams; no final exam. A Laboratory Score will be computed as the sum of laboratory report scores, relevant homework grades, and relevant in-class quizz grades; a Design Score will be similarly computed. Your weighted course score will be calculated as:
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Laboratory Score
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Design Score
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Notebook
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60%
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30%
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10%
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Course grades will not be curved; it is possible for everyone in the class to get an A (or an F). Your grade depends only on your performance, not on how everyone else in the class does. Thus, there is no reason not to help your classmates in every legal way possible. Course grades will be assigned according to the following ranking. A letter modifier of "+" will be added for scores at the top end of the range, e.g., 87-89.9 = B+.
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Score:
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>=90
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80-89.9
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70-79.9
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60-69.9
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<60
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Grade:
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A
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B
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C
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D
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F
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Prerequsites:
Students taking ELEC 464 should be familiar with the following concepts or facts. At the very least, they should remember having seen them and know where to look up what they need to know.
Mathematics: Complex numbers; vectors; simple differential equations; statistical mean and variance.
Physics & Chemistry: Photon and wave nature of light; discrete energy states of atoms; transition between discrete states with emission or absorption of energy; existence and nature of crystals.
Electromagnetics: The nature of plane waves and their propagation; reflection-refraction at a dielectric boundary; definition of polarization; phase and interference.
Simple Optics: Snell's law; properties of simple lenses (focal length, f-number, imaging formula); prisms and diffraction gratings.
Materials: Dielectric constant, index of refraction, and dispersion.
Electronics: Bandwidth required for a given rise-time or pulse width; basic operational amplifier use (voltage follower; amplifier); RLC filters.
Signals: Fourier transform: basic pairs, similarity, shift and convolution theorems.
