Diverse-projects design-experiences in analog/digital microelectronic systems

The basic challenge of supervising diverse microelectronics prototype projects is to make do with limited facilities in a vastly changing world of electronic systems requirements. This paper presents the experience of supervising and managing diverse projects in the advanced VLSIC analog/digital systems design graduate course at the Microelectronics System Design Lab (MSDL), Oakland University. Another pronounced benefit in assigning multiple projects is linking students to ongoing research efforts at the MSDL. Some of the completed one-term projects are directly connected to industrial applications. Other projects contributed to the effort of building apt analog standard cells library. All projects have been implemented through the MOSIS facilities. In a number of cases testing, and evaluation has been done by different students than the original designers.