Electronic Design and Automation Lab: Migration to Scilab

The third semester B.Tech Electronics and Communication Engineering programme of Kerala Technological University (KTU) has a lab course on electronic design and automation. The course aims to introduce the students to various electronic design and simulation tools like SPICE, MATLAB and HDL. I had proposed the migration of the MATLAB section of this lab course to SCILAB, a popular open source alternative to MATLAB. The migration is now complete with support from FOSSEE . [Read More]

FOSS migration of electronic circuit simulation lab

My proposal for migrating basic electronic circuit simulation lab to the FOSS tool eSim has been approved. The source code and documentation of experiments can now be downloaded from here. eSim is an open source EDA tool for circuit design, simulation, analysis and PCB design. eSim is developed by FOSSEE (Free and Open Source Software for Education) – an initiative of MHRD, Govt. of India. FOSSEE promotes the migration of labs in educational institutions from proprietary tools to FOSS only ones through lab migration projects. [Read More]

Experimenting eSim- A tool for Electronic Circuit Simulation

I did not have much exposure to open source Electronic Design Automation tools during my graduation course in Electronics and Communication Engineering. My institute had proprietary EDA tools in the lab and all my experiences were limited to them. I must confess I never tried to explore the FOSS world for alternatives until I was in a need to offer a lab course on basic circuit simulation. Web searches took me to the design suite eSim . [Read More]

A laboratory manual for basic analog communication experiments

I was in need of a manual for introducing the analog communication lab experiments to students who had no prior exposure to electronic circuits or analog communication techniques. Since I found no such book which matched my needs, I planned to prepare a laboratory manual which could help students with the basic understanding of electronic circuit theory to learn and experiment the fundamentals of analog communication techniques. The lab manual discusses different methods of implementing analog modulation and demodulation using transistors, switching IC CD4016, opamp IC 741, PLL IC CD4046, timer IC 555 etc along with passive components like IFTs(Intermediate Frequency Transformers), capacitors and resistors. [Read More]