ELEC 241: Fundamentals of Electrical Engineering I

Course Overview

The course’s objectives are to provide, through homework and tutorials, the technical foundations for succeeding courses in electrical engineering and, through the laboratory, the practical foundations.
Prerequisites: Math 101, 102.

Course Outline

Elements of signal and system theory

Signal and system analysis

Information Transmission

Fundamentals of Communication System Design

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 describe and analyze the operation of Amplitude Modulation (AM) for communicating information;
  6. Specify how to encode and recover a bandlimited signal with a digital sequence using the sampling theorem and amplitude quantization;
  7. Analyze the behavior of digital systems on discrete-time signals using the Discrete-Time Fourier Transform (DTFT);
  8. Calculate the complexity of implementing discrete-time filtering using the Fast Fourier Transform; describe and analyze discrete-time filtering of analog signals;
  9. Describe the operation of baseband and modulated communication systems, and analyze the signal-to-noise ratio of AM systems;
  10. Explain the use of binary phase-shift keying (BPSK) for communicating digital information with analog signals, and performance of BPSK in the presence of noise;
  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 compare the tradeoffs between using digital and analog methods for communicating information.

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

Required Texts

Johnson and Wise, ELEC 241, Connexions course pak
Wise and Johnson, ELEC 241 Laboratory Manual
A lab notebook will be required for each lab group.


08/19/2013