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.