I haven’t updated anything lately due to my busy schedule: juggling four upper division Electrical Engineering classes, working at Sixth Market on campus, trying to find an internship or something concrete to do over the summer, dealing with problems from home, and personally putting my life back in order like organizing a stack of papers.
In terms of classes, this quarter has so far been one of the most interesting quarters on many of the courses I’m taking. I’ve begun to solidify my understanding of the Electrical Engineering courses I’ve learned over the years and how they apply towards the current courses I’m taking. I do feel overburdened by all the knowledge, understanding, and time commitments that each specific course requires.
ECE 107 or Electromagnetism is probably the hardest course since it involves lots of vector calculus and physics, and an intuitive ability to understand how all of it comes together. I’ve dropped this course several times in the past because I couldn’t comprehend most of the content within the given timeframe but this quarter I understood how most of it works. The only problem I have in the class is making small mistakes in calculations or judgements in how to apply equations that throw off everything. I do need to practice more on this subject but it’s an interesting subject that shows how things work together on an atomic level.
ECE 188 or Power Electronics is probably the most interesting course since it involves applications on electricity for large scale usage. From my understanding, the bulk of UCSD’s Electrical Engineering undergraduate career involves engineering geared primarily towards semiconductors and this neglects power applications. On the other end of the spectrum is Computer Science which UCSD has been successful in specializing between Computer Science and Electrical Engineering but not so great when trying to mix bits of the other end. Going back to Power Electronics, this category doesn’t really exist yet in UCSD but this class is a pretty good start towards filling this missing void that I’ve always wondered (as to why I was studying semiconductors instead of electrical power applications such as those presented in this class when the major was “electrical engineering”. I was a very naive and uneducated incoming freshman with no concrete prior background in any physics). Building the circuits for lab and seeing how the waveforms of the voltages and currents helped me better understand this part of electricity that I’ve always been wanting to know but never learned or understood in the lower division courses.
ECE 163 has been a weird course to me since it consists of a mix of circuits and systems I’ve learned in my upper division breadth courses. The labs were relatively easy to understand on how they worked but I think I’ll probably understand the point of things better when in the next few weeks left in the course.
ECE 111 is probably the course I want to devote the most time on. It’s essentially an open-ended design course that uses Verilog to create complex circuits to complete some real world application function. In the beginning, I didn’t really know how Verilog worked so my lab partner worked on the bulk of the first project on the Fibonacci calculator. I contributed mostly towards conceptually visualizing and debugging the code he created. From this I sort of learned how to debug through viewing the waveforms. For the second project, I’ll have to admit that I went a bit crazy in finishing it. I started out drawing a state machine of the Run Length Encoding that I would build and took a dive towards Verilog programming. Starting out took a bit of work to understand how to assign gates and such on a hardware level when the programming language was based very similar to C. Ironically this was the very first time I’ve ever used Verilog and after fumbling a bit in coding, I quickly learned to debug to fix my code. And from there, I seriously went crazy into debugging and optimizing every bit and part of my code to make it more efficient. For the longest time, I thought the best specifications given was the average benchmark which drove me to get closer and closer to it. I even resorted to drawing Karnaugh maps to see how I could simplify all the code that I had. Eventually, I was able to pass the Area*Delay benchmark but I was aiming for a faster delay and this was a constant OCD that I couldn’t stop wanting to optimize until I finally hit the point where I believed that it would take too much effort to further optimize the code with the current state machine that I was using. Even then, the benchmarks I obtained were still better in comparison to the REAL average that I finally realized towards the end.
The worst part of this quarter was when I had a 107 Quiz and 188 midterm back to back in the afternoon and 163 Midterm the next morning right before SunGod Festival (which I couldn’t go and instead went back home for Berkeley’s Graduation). Having that many tests within a small time period was too much for me to comprehend too quickly and I know I did not do so well because of that. On the other hand when it was the night before SunGod, I noticed this:
This essentially made my day after a long terrible week and a good start towards the weekend when I went back home. And this sums up a part of the state of affairs currently in school. I’ll be putting up more posts when I get the chance.
