Instructor: Prof. Sachin B. Patkar
Session: 2019-2020
Prerequisites: This course doesn’t have any pre-requisites per se.
Course content and structure:
- Working on a Krypton CLPD Board
- Building an ALU using structural programming
- Implementing a string recognizer using an FSM
- Implementing a Reaction Game using process statements
- Using scan chain
Feedback on lectures:
This Lab had the potential to be very exciting and interesting but was ultimately reduced a major pain in the semester. The Lectures were conducted by the Professor at the start of the Lab timing, by calling us half an hour early. We were thrown a lot of content out of nowhere and after about 5 minutes almost everyone lost interest. Even the TAs used to doze off xD. The software setup itself was a major problem with no pre-decided structure on how to set it up and solve the errors if any. This course was only decent if you were lucky and had been assigned a good TA otherwise you’re pretty much screwed. My TA did not have a lot of idea about the course content and as a result everyone on my table including the TA was struggling with the course. Finally, the Professor used to literally spam moodle with constant messages throughout the day to a point that important messages got lost in them. One time, an assignment was uploaded at 2am and it was expected of us to submit it the next day.
Most of the course can still be done by taking help of friends and slogging it out from your side. Scan Chain is a challenging part, watch out for that!
Feedback on tutorials and exams: We (thankfully) did not have any Midsem or Endsem. Although there were 5 mark quizzes before each lab quizzing us about the Pre-lab reading content.
Difficulty (on a scale of 1 being very easy to 5 being very hard): 4
Textbooks & References: There are no textbooks as such, following the PPTs and Lecture Slides and some googling on your part should be more than enough.
Grading Statistics: Everyone was awarded an S Grade
Additional comments & what you learnt from the course: As much as I would have liked to, I did not learn anything significant from the course. I had been looking forward to this course a lot, but it just turned into a major let-down.