A World Wide Web-Based Laboratory for Undergraduate Analog VLSI Design

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The World Wide Web's (WWW) current explosion in popularity and accessibility is shaping the way educational institutions provide future service to their students. At the present time, there is a sporadic, but growing, movement to provide WWW access to laboratories. This capability promises to provide those teaching undergraduate-level courses the ability to access truly state-of-the-art educational facilities from distant locations, with little or no additional cost to the distant campus. This project centers around the development of an undergraduate web-based laboratory in the area of analog integrated circuit design and testing. The plan is to develop a suite of automated instrumentation to be used for measuring the characteristics of the prefabricated analog integrated circuit in several undergraduate level laboratories. The instrumentation is controlled and the measurement results transmitted over the WWW. The equipment acquired to implement this instrumentation suite is a personal computer controller (featuring an interface to the WWW), a GPIB-controlled signal analyzer, a function generator, a programmable power supply, a frequency counter, a digital storage oscilloscope, and a high-frequency digital multimeter. The instrumentation is being controlled in a similar fashion as the current senior laboratory equipment at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, which is based on a similar equipment suite.