Electrical & Computer Engineering

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  • ENG EC 455: Electromagnetic Systems I
    Time varying electric and magnetic fields. Maxwell equations. Electromagnetic waves. Propagation, reflection, and transmission. Remote sensing applications. Radio frequency coaxial cables, microwave waveguides, and optical fibers. Microwave sources and resonators. Antennas and radiation. Radio links, radar, and wireless communication systems. Electromagnetic effects in high-speed digital systems. Includes lab.
  • ENG EC 456: Electromagnetic Systems II
    Electric field, energy, and force. Lorenz force. Dielectric materials. Steady electric currents. Magnetic field, energy, and force. Magnetic materials. Applications of electrostatics, magnetostatics, and electrodynamics. Electromagnetic waves in dielectric and conducting materials. Solution techniques for electromagnetic fields and waves.
  • ENG EC 463: Senior Design Project I
    Development of the technical, communication, personal, and team skills needed for successful design in electrical and computer engineering. Specifications and standards, information collection, design strategies, modeling, computer- aided design, optimization, system design, failure and reliability, human factors. Oral and written communication of technical information. Team dynamics and ethical issues in design. Design project for a small-scale electrical or computer system. Preparation of detailed proposals for senior design projects in the following semester. Includes lab. Effective Fall 2020, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Digital/Multimedia Expression, Writing-Intensive Course, Research and Information Literacy.
    • Digital/Multimedia Expression
    • Research and Information Literacy
    • Writing-Intensive Course
  • ENG EC 464: Senior Design Project II
    Continuation of a team project in an area of electrical and computer engineering, as proposed in EC 463. Application of technical, communication, personal, and team skills. Oral and written communication of technical information, including progress reports, technical memos, final report, and oral presentations. Includes lab. Effective Spring 2021, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Oral and/or Signed Communication, Writing-Intensive Course.
  • ENG EC 467: Senior Honors Thesis
    Well-prepared students may choose to do a formal senior thesis under the direct guidance of a departmental faculty member. Students selecting this option must obtain petitioned approval before the beginning of the semester of thesis registration.
  • ENG EC 470: Sensors in Space
    This course provides a practical introduction to the development, integration, and deployment of instrumentation on spacecraft platforms. Students are introduced to the physical concepts and practical designs of sensors that measure particles, magnetic fields, and electric fields over a range of energies and frequencies. Particular attention is given to special constraints presented by the space environment. In addition to established designs, the course will also cover new and emerging sensor technologies. The course includes a lab component in which students will learn about small satellite development through design and implementation of a high-altitude balloon ("balloon-sat") experiment.
  • ENG EC 471: Physics of Semiconductor Devices
    This course addresses the theory of semiconductors and semiconductor electronic devices. The section on the theory of semiconductor includes their crystal structure, energy bands, and carrier concentration in thermal equilibrium as well as carrier transport phenomena (drift, diffusion, generation and recombination, tunneling, high field effects, and thermionic emission). The section on electronic devices addresses the theory of p-n junctions and heterojunctions, of Bipolar Junction Transistors (BJT), Thyristors, Metal Oxide Semiconductor (MOS) Capacitors and MOS Field Effect Transistors (MOSFETs).
  • ENG EC 500: Special Topics in Electrical and Computer Engineering
    Specific prerequisites vary according to topic. Coverage of a specific topic in electrical, computer, or systems engineering. Subject varies from year to year and is generally from an area of current or emerging research.
  • ENG EC 501: Dynamic System Theory
    Introduction to analytical concepts and examples of dynamic systems and control. Mathematical description and state space formation of dynamic systems; modeling, controllability, and observability. Eigenvector and transform analysis of linear systems including canonical forms. Performance specifications. State feedback: pole placement and the linear quadratic regulator. Introduction to MIMO design and system identification using computer tools and laboratory experiments. Same as ENG ME 501 and ENG SE 501. Students may not receive credit for both.
  • ENG EC 503: Introduction to Learning from Data
    This is an introductory course in statistical learning covering the basic theory, algorithms, and applications. This course will focus on the following major classes of supervised and unsupervised learning problems: classification, regression, density estimation, clustering, and dimensionality reduction. Generative and discriminative data models and associated learning algorithms of parametric and non-parametric varieties will be studied within both frequentist and Bayesian settings in a unified way. A variety of contemporary applications will be explored through homework assignments and a project.
  • ENG EC 504: Advanced Data Structures
    Review of basic data structures and Java syntax. Data abstraction and object-oriented design in the context of high-level languages and databases. Design implementation from the perspective of data structure efficiency and distributed control. Tailoring priority queues, balanced search trees, and graph algorithms to real-world problems, such as network routing, database management, and transaction processing.
  • ENG EC 505: Stochastic Processes
    Introduction to discrete and continuous-time random processes. Correlation and power spectral density functions. Linear systems driven by random processes. Optimum detection and estimation. Bayesian, Weiner, and Kalman filtering.
  • ENG EC 508: Wireless Communication
    Fundamentals of wireless communication from a physical layer perspective. Multipath signal propagation and fading channel models. Design of constellations to exploit time, frequency, and spatial diversity. Reliable communication and single-user capacity. Interference management, multiple-access protocols, and multi-user capacity. Cellular uplink and downlink. Multiple-antenna systems and architectures. Connections to modern wireless systems and standards.
  • ENG EC 511: Software Systems Design
    Concept of software product life cycle. Various forms of a software product from requirements definition through operation and maintenance. Life cycle models and the activities performed in each phase. Role of rapid prototyping in requirements analysis and design. Design concepts and design strategies. Comparative evaluation of requirements definition and design methods. Analysis and design validation. Small-team projects involving architectural design and software specification.
  • ENG EC 512: Enterprise Client-Server Software Systems Design
    Examination of past, current, and emerging technologies. Client side technologies including DHTML, CSS, scripting, ActiveX, RSS, and proprietary applications. Legacy server side technologies including CGI, ISAPL, and active server pages. Current and emerging server technologies including ASP.NET 2, XML/SOAP web services, wireless and handheld access, WAP/WML, SQL databases, streaming media, CMS, and middleware. Design and implementation of solutions involving database connectivity, session state, security requirements, SSL, and authentication of clients. Small-team projects involving design through implementation.
  • ENG EC 513: Computer Architecture
    Computer architecture and design. Topics include computer arithmetic and ALU design; performance evaluation; instruction set design; CPU design, including pipelining, branch prediction, and speculative execution; memory hierarchy, including cache basics, cache design for performance, and virtual memory support; I/O, including devices, interfaces, specification, and modeling. Examples from high-end microprocessors and embedded systems.
  • ENG EC 514: Simulation
    Modeling of discrete event systems and their analysis through simulation. Systems considered include, but are not limited to, manufacturing systems, computer-communication networks, and computer systems. Simulating random environments and output analysis in such contexts. A simulation language is introduced and is the main tool for simulation experimentation. Meets with ENG ME 514; students may not receive credit for both.
  • ENG EC 515: Digital Communication
    Canonical point-to-point digital communication problem; Communication channel models; Optimal receiver principles with focus on additive Gaussian noise channels: Maximum Aposteriori Probability (MAP) and Maximum Likelihood (ML) receivers for both vector and waveform channels, principles of irrelevance and reversibility; Concepts of signal space and signal constellation; Efficient signaling for message sequences over frequency-flat additive Gaussian noise channels: basic digital modulation and demodulation techniques and their performance analysis; Notions of symbol and bit rate, symbol and bit error probability, and power and bandwidth efficiency; Real passband additive Gaussian noise waveform channels and their equivalent complex base-band representation; Efficient signaling for message sequences over general bandlimited additive Gaussian noise channels: signal design and equalization methods to combat intersymbol interference; Coherent versus Noncoherent digital signaling; Synchronization; Channel estimation; Error correction coding basics.
  • ENG EC 516: Digital Signal Processing
    Advanced structures and techniques for digital signal processing and their properties in relation to application requirements such as real-time, low-bandwidth, and low-power operation. Optimal FIR filter design; time-dependent Fourier transform and filterbanks; Hilbert transform relations; cepstral analysis and deconvolution; parametric signal modeling; multidimensional signal processing; multirate signal processing.
  • ENG EC 517: Introduction to Information Theory
    Discrete memoryless stationary sources and channels; Information measures on discrete and continuous alphabets and their properties: entropy, conditional entropy, relative entropy, mutual information, differential entropy; Elementary constrained convex optimization; Fundamental information inequalities: data-processing, and Fano's; Block source coding with outage: weak law of large numbers, entropically typical sequences and typical sets, asymptotic equipartition property; Block channel coding with and without cost constraints: jointly typical sequences, channel capacity, random coding, Shannon's channel coding theorem, introduction to practical linear block codes; Rate-distortion theory: Shannon's block source coding theorem relative to a fidelity criterion; Source and channel coding for Gaussian sources and channels and parallel Gaussian sources and channels (water-filling and reverse water-filling); Shannon's source-channel separation theorem for point-to-point communication; Lossless data compression: Kraft's inequality, Shannon's lossless source coding theorem, variable-length source codes including Huffman, Shannon-Fano-Elias, and Arithmetic codes; Applications; Mini course-project.

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