Electronics

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 . The source code of the experiments are now available here. A detailed lab manual will be made available soon. ...

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. ...

Kerala Technological University (KTU) published a draft syllabus for the third and fourth semesters of Electronics and Communication Engineering for the coming academic year. It raised widespread concerns regarding: The depth and vastness of contents The obsoleteness of contents Sequence of introducing concepts and the pedagogy involved FOSS friendliness To discuss the matter and collect feedback from a wider academic community, KTU called for a syllabi discussion meeting at its office on 13th May, 2016. More than a hundred faculties from various engineering colleges in Kerala came over and expressed their genuine concerns, comments and suggestions. I got opportunity to attend the same. ...

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 . It is an open source EDA tool for circuit design, simulation, analysis and PCB design. It is an integrated tool built using open source software such as KiCad and Ngspice. eSim is released under GPL. It’s GUI guides the user through the steps of schematic creation, netlist generation, PCB design and simulation. eSim source code iis hosted at: https://github.com/FOSSEE/eSim . ...

Frequency modulation is a common analog modulation technique. Here the instantaneous frequency of the carrier wave is varied with the instantaneous amplitude of the message signal. That is the information regarding the message is available in the frequency of the carrier. It is a kind of more generic technique called angle modulation. [][1]Sinusoidal frequency modulation of square wave carrier Gnu-octave has built-in function fmmod() available in octave-communications package for implementing frequency modulation. But this function modulates the given message signal with a sinusoidal carrier of specified frequency. If we want the carrier to be a square wave as shown in the figure, the built-in function would not help. ...

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. ...