Minutes 11/7/2022

Date

Nov 7, 2022

Attendees

M.A. Belabbas, S. Bogdanov, X. Chen, Z. Cheng, P. Dragic, N. Kani, E. Kudeki, J. Kim, S. Lumetta, O. Mironenko,  U. Ravaioli.  Guest: S. Patel.

Minutes

The committee reviewed ECE 498SJP "Accelerator Architectures" submitted by Sanjay Patel as first temporary offering.  Sanjay attended the meeting and gave an introduction to the courses.  This is a continuation of ECE 411 and covers a rapidly emerging area of chip design for which there is growing demand.  There was some discussion on prerequisites.  Besides ECE 411 or CS 433, experience with System Verilog was listed, mainly because CS 433 does not go into verification as ECE 411.  However, students may have picked up sufficient experience in internships.  Also, it may be sufficient to have knowledge of any verification framework and details of System Verilog can be learn during the course along the way.  It was suggested to modify the prerequisite statement to be less restrictive.  This can be finalized also based on feedback received from the Graduate Committee.  While this course could be interesting to EE undergraduate students, it is expected that without knowledge of the material in ECE 411 it would be very difficult for them to succeed.  This new temporary offering for Spring 2023 was approved with unanimous consent by the committee.

The second item of discussion was the discontinuance of ECE 466 "Optical Communications Lab" as a standalone laboratory and modification of ECE 465 "Optical Communications Systems" with incorporation of the laboratory component with increase of credit hours from 3 to 4.  Peter Dragic introduced the proposals and indicated that rarely students have taken ECE 466 without concurrent registration in ECE 465.  Occasionally, some graduate student may be enrolled in the lab in order to pick up some related skills for their research but without knowledge of material in ECE 465 this has not proved to be very productive.  It was also discussed that the title of the course should be modernized.  In the end it was agreed to change the title to "Fiber Optic Communications".  The two proposals were approved with unanimous consent by the committee.

The planned discussion on ABET was deferred to the next meeting because time ran out.