The Electrical Engineering Undergraduate Laboratory (RCA Lab) is equipped with state-of-the-art electrical measurements instruments and software for data acquisition, analysis and simulations. This was made possible through the lab renovation of 1995-1998.

Each workstation contains industry standard HP microprocessor based instruments (and computer HPIB interface), National Instruments data acquisition board, LabVIEW, BenchLink software, Electronics Workbench simulator and Pentium based PCs. A schematic of a typical lab workstation is shown in the figure below.

Each station has the following pieces of equipment:

Hardware:

PC with GPIB and ethernet cards

Data acquisition I/O board (Lab-PC+ from National Instruments)

Triple output programmable DC power supply (HP E3631A)

Digital Multimeter (including frequency counter) HP 34401A)

Function Generator/Arbitrary Waveform Generator (HP 33120A)

Digital Oscilloscope (HP 54600B)

Measurement and storage module (FFT; HP54650A)

Logic Analyzer card (to be added soon)

Others: Analog multimeter, power supply.

Software:

LabVIEW (National Instruments): data acquisition and analysis

BenchLink (HP): PC based instrument control

Electronics Workbench (Interactive Image Technology): analog and digital simulator

Xilinx Foundation Series Software: FPGA based programming environment

Others: Netscape, FTP,  telnet, 6811 based compilers

Brief descriptions and specifications of the instruments are available EE Undergraduate home page.

The approach of this state-of-the-art laboratory is to bring computers, instruments and software closer together in such a way that it will allow students to function in a manner similar to that of professionals in industry and academia.

The instruments are interconnected to the PC through an HPIB (GPIB) interface. The PCs themselves are networked together and connected to the campus wide PennNet. Student have thus access to all resources on campus as well as outside from their lab bench. This is very handy for looking up information such as data sheets, suppliers, tutorials as well as for doing simulations on other computers (such as PSpice or HSpice), for writing reports and storing files on their home PC or central computer (ENIAC).

In addition to the instruments associate with each lab workstation, the EE Undergraduate lab has a wide range of other instruments and tools available. These include is a device programmer (ChipMaster 6000) supporting over 1200 different devices (PAL, CPAL, EPROM, PROM, etc.), Xilinx FPGA software and programming boards, high performance I/O board, logic analyzer, curve tracers, high frequency test instruments, power meters, Gauss meters, etc. Please consult the lab manager for details about the available equipment.