EE 224 – DIGITAL SYSTEMS

Instructor: Prof. Virendra Singh

Session: 2019-2020

Prerequisites: Digital electronics from EE 113 is a soft pre-requisite for the initial lectures as the professor assumes you know the basics. For the VHDL part, a parallel lab course runs for EE students (EE 214).

Course content and structure: Review of basic combinational and sequential logic, Review of digital electronics,Digital Logic Families: TTL, CMOS etc.,Number systems and basic digital arithmetic,Finite State Machine Design, Analysis and Synthesis, Introduction to Hardware Description Language,Array based logic elements (Memory, PLA, FPGA),Special Topics (such as processor design, testing and verification, special digital systems, asynchronous state machines etc.)

Feedback on lectures:

The instructor conducted the course very well. His teaching style was very detailed. He gave a recap of the previous lectures during the initial 10-15 minutes of the class. He was concerned that students clarify their doubts during the lectures and motivated the students to do so. He motivated students towards self-study.
He conducted extra classes, doubt sessions for the topics he felt were not understood by the students (via evaluation of quizzes) OR if requested by a majority of students.
Lots of examples were given by professor to aid the theory content. He was also willing to offer personal help to the students. He was willing to conduct VHDL lectures for EP guys, since they didn’t have a lab course.
And the professor is not very punctual arriving for the lectures but leaves as lecture duration finishes.
Our lectures ended abruptly after midsems, due to COVID-19.

Feedback on tutorials and exams:

In our case 1-2 tutorials were conducted, which were mainly treated as doubt session OR sometimes a lecture. In tutorials, discussion and revision of various topics was done.
The instructor held weekly quizzes which ended up having a 50% weightage in our batch due to the COVID-19 situation. The mid-semester exam had another 50% weightage. Some of the tests and the mid-semester exam had bonus questions but bonus marks were awarded iff your marks were above a certain threshold (obtained from the non-bonus questions). All the examinations in the course were open book. Some of the questions did have a binary grading scheme. Instructor did provide some extra time for completion of exam if needed by the student.
The weekly quizzes helped for revision of the concepts taught so far and mostly tested the material taught in previous lectures. The quizzes were of easy to moderate difficulty level.
The mid-semester exam was moderate. It consisted of questions ranging from easy to difficult. The bonus questions were easy to solve, but the threshold from non-bonus had to be crossed.

Difficulty (on a scale of 1 being very easy to 5 being very hard): 3

Textbooks & References: Switching and Finite Automata Theory by Kohavi and Jha was the textbook recommended by the instructor.

Grading Statistics: The grading was the most lenient grading ever witnessed from an EE professor.
AA 61
AB 71
AP 3
BB 33
BC 15
CC 2
FF 1
S 15
Total 201

Additional comments & what you learnt from the course: Paying attention in the classes paid off quite well. Since, CS guys had the same course by the same instructor, some of the quiz questions overlapped and helped for practice. The midsem had the questions from the midsem held for CS students, and since their midsem was earlier than EE and EP section, we had a set of practice questions with us. The course content was partially covered for our batch due to COVID-19 situation.

Review by – Prakhar Diwan (prakhardiwan2000@gmail.com)