2017-2018 Graduate Catalog [ARCHIVED CATALOG]
Electrical Engineering
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 Return to: Lyle School of Engineering: Academic Programs
Professor Dinesh Rajan, Chair
Professors: Jerome K. Butler, Marc P. Christensen, Scott C. Douglas, Gary A. Evans, W. Milton Gosney, Ping Gui, Duncan L. MacFarlane, Panos E. Papamichalis, Behrouz Peikari, Dinesh Rajan, Mitchell A. Thornton
Associate Professors: Joseph D. Camp, Carlos E. Davila, James G. Dunham, Choon S. Lee, Jianhui Wang
Assistant Professors: Mohammad Khodayar, Dario J. Villarreal Suarez
Senior Lecturer: M. Scott Kingsley
Adjunct Faculty: Sudipto Chakraborty, Joseph R. Cleveland, John Fattaruso, Hossam H. H’mimy, Clark D. Kinnaird, Kamakshi Sridhar
General Information
The Electrical Engineering Department is housed in the Jerry R. Junkins Engineering Building. The building contains teaching classrooms and laboratories, as well as space for faculty offices and the EE department staff and operations.
The department has access to the Lyle School of Engineering academic computing resources, consisting of shared use computer servers and desktop client systems connected to a network backbone. All of the servers in the Lyle School of Engineering are running some variant of UNIX or Microsoft Windows. There is one primary file server that holds 356GB of data and exports files using FNS or CIFS protocols. Each user, whether faculty, staff or student, has a “home” directory on the central file server. This directory is exported to other servers or desktop computers, regardless of operating systems, as needed. There are more than 40 servers with purposes that include file service, UNIX mail, Exchange mail, firewall, UNIX authentication, NT authentication, printer management, lab image download, classroom-specific software, X windows service, news, domain name service, computational resources and general use. This allows the files to be used as a resource in both the UNIX and Microsoft PC environments. Almost all computing equipment within the Lyle School of Engineering is connected to the engineering network at 100 megabits and higher. The network backbone is running at a gigabit per second over fiber. Most servers and all engineering buildings are connected to this gigabit backbone network. The backbone within engineering is connected to both the Internet 2 and the campus network that is then connected to the Internet at large. In addition to servers and shared computational resources, the Lyle School of Engineering maintains a number of individual computing laboratories associated with the engineering departments.
Antenna Lab. This laboratory consists of two facilities for fabrication and testing. Most of the antennas fabricated at the SMU antenna lab are microstrip antennas. Small and less complex antennas are made with milling machines, and a photolithic/chemical etching method is used to make more complex and large antennas. Fabricated antennas are characterized with a Hewlett-Packard 5810B network analyzer. Workstations are available for antenna design and theoretical computation. Radiation characteristics are measured at the Dallas-SMU Antenna Characterization Lab near the University of Texas at Dallas campus.
Biomedical Engineering Laboratory. This laboratory contains instrumentation for carrying out research in electrophysiology, psychophysics and medical ultrasound. Four Grass physiographs permit the measurement of electro-encephalograms as well as visual and auditory evoked brain potentials. The lab also contains a state-of-the-art dual Purkinje eye tracker and image stabilizer made by Fourward Technologies Inc., a Vision Research Graphics 21-inch Digital Multisync Monitor for displaying visual stimuli, and a Cambridge Research Systems visual stimulus generator capable of generating a variety of stimuli for use in psychophysical and electro-physiological experiments. Ultrasound data can also be measured with a Physical Acoustics apparatus consisting of a water tank, radio frequency pulser/receiver and radio frequency data acquisition system. Several PCs are also available for instrumentation control and data acquisition.
Multimedia Systems Laboratory. This facility includes an acoustic chamber with adjoining recording studio to allow high-quality sound recordings to be made. The chamber is sound isolating with double- or triple-wall sheet rock on all four sides, as well as an isolating ceiling barrier above the drop ceiling. The walls of the chamber have been constructed to be nonparallel to avoid flutter echo and dominant frequency modes. Acoustic paneling on the walls of the chamber are removable and allow the acoustic reverberation time to be adjusted to simulate different room acoustics. The control room next to the acoustic chamber includes a large, 4-by-8-foot acoustic window and an inert acoustic door facing the acoustic chamber. Up to 16 channels of audio can be carried in or out of the chamber to the control room. Experiments to be conducted in the Multimedia Systems Laboratory include blind source separation, deconvolution and dereverberation. Several of the undergraduate courses in electrical engineering use sound and music to motivate system-level design and signal processing applications. The Multimedia Systems Laboratory can be used in these activities to develop data sets for use in classroom experiments and laboratory projects for students to complete.
Wireless Systems Laboratory. This laboratory contains an array of infrastructure for experimentation across a number of wireless frequency bands, platforms and environments for research and instruction in lab-based courses on wireless communications and networking. The infrastructure includes 1) state-of-the-art test equipment for repeatability, control and observability of wireless channels, including complex channel emulators, fixed and mobile spectrum analyzers, wide-band oscilloscopes, and signal generators; 2) a wide range of reprogrammable wireless testbeds that operate from 400 MHz to 6 GHz for IEEE 802.11, cellular, and Bluetooth network and protocol development; and 3) diverse mobile phones and tablets that enable participatory sensing, context-aware applications and large-scale deployment in the field. The in-lab infrastructure is also enhanced by multiple outdoor antennas deployed on campus buildings and buses for understanding real wireless channels.
Semiconductor Processing Cleanroom. The 2,800 square-foot cleanroom, consisting of a 2,400 square-foot, Class 10,000 room and a Class 1,000 lithography area of 400 square feet, is located in the Jerry R. Junkins Engineering Building. A partial list of equipment in this laboratory includes acid and solvent hoods, photoresist spinners, two contact mask aligners, a thermal evaporator, a plasma asher, a plasma etcher, a turbo-pumped methane hydrogen reactive ion etcher, a four-target sputtering system, a plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition reactor, a diffusion-pumped four pocket e-beam evaporator, an ellipsometer and profilometers. Other equipment includes a boron-trichloride reactive ion etcher, a chemical-assisted ion-beam etcher, and a four-tube diffusion furnace. The cleanroom is capable of processing silicon, compound semiconductors and piezo materials for microelectronic, photonic and nanotechnology devices.
Submicron Grating Laboratory. This laboratory is dedicated to holographic grating fabrication and has the capability of sub 10th-micron lines and spaces. Equipment in this laboratory includes a floating air table, an argon ion laser (ultraviolet lines) and an Atomic Force Microscope. This laboratory is used to make photonic devices with periodic features such as distributed feedback, distributed Bragg reflector, and grating-outcoupled and photonic crystal semiconductor lasers.
Photonic Devices Laboratory. This laboratory is dedicated to characterizing the optical and electrical properties of photonic devices. Equipment in this laboratory program includes an optical spectrum analyzer, an optical multimeter, visible and infrared cameras, an automated laser characterization system for edge-emitting lasers, a manual probe test system for surface-emitting lasers, a manual probe test system for edge-emitting laser die and bars, and a near- and far-field measurement system.
Photonics Simulation Laboratory. This laboratory has specific computer programs that have been developed and continue to be developed for modeling and designing semiconductor lasers and optical waveguides, couplers and switches. These programs include:
- WAVEGUIDE: Calculates near-field, far-field and effective indices of dielectric waveguides and semiconductor lasers with up to 500 layers. Each layer can contain gain or loss.
- GAIN: Calculates the gain as a function of energy, carrier density and current density for strained and unstrained quantum wells for a variety of material systems.
- GRATING: Uses the Floquet Bloch approach and the boundary element method to calculate reflection, transmission and outcoupling of dielectric waveguides and laser structures with any number of layers.
- FIBER: Calculates the fields, effective index, group velocity and dispersion for fibers with a circularly symmetric index of refraction profiles.
Additional software is under development to model the modulation characteristics of photonic devices.
Photonic Architectures Laboratory. This laboratory is a fully equipped optomechanical and electrical prototyping facility, supporting the activities of faculty and graduate students in experimental and analytical tasks. The lab is ideally suited for the packaging, integration and testing of devices, modules and prototypes of optical systems. It has three large vibration isolated tables, a variety of visible and infrared lasers, single element 1-D and 2-D detector arrays, and a large complement of optical and opto-mechanical components and mounting devices. In addition, the laboratory has extensive data acquisition and analysis equipment, including an IEEE 1394 FireWire-capable image capture and processing workstation, specifically designed to evaluate the electrical and optical characteristics of smart pixel devices and FSOI fiber-optic modules. Support electronics hardware includes various test instrumentation, such as arbitrary waveform generators, and a variety of CAD tools for optical and electronic design, including optical ray trace and finite difference time domain software.
The discipline of electrical engineering is at the core of today’s technology-driven society. Personal computers, computer-communications networks, integrated circuits, optical technologies, digital signal processors and wireless communications systems have revolutionized the way people live and work, and extraordinary advances in these fields are announced every day. Because today’s society truly is a technological society, graduate education in electrical engineering offers exceptional opportunities for financial security and personal satisfaction.
The Department of Electrical Engineering at SMU offers a full complement of courses at the master’s and Ph.D. level in communications, information technology, communication networks, digital signal processing, lasers and optoelectronics, electromagnetics and microwaves, microelectronics, VLSI design, systems and control, and image processing and computer vision. The courses and curriculum are designed and continuously updated to prepare the student for engineering research, design and development at the forefront of these fields.
A professionally oriented master’s degree in telecommunications systems is also offered through the Electrical Engineering Department, and courses in the curriculum (designated EETS) prepare the student for leadership roles in telecommunications systems management and planning and for developing new telecommunications products, services and applications.
Graduate Degrees. The Electrical Engineering Department offers the following graduate degrees:
ProgramsDoctoral
Master
Dual Degree
CoursesElectrical Engineering
For EE courses, the third digit in the course number designator indicates the subject area represented by the course. The courses for the master’s degree in telecommuni-cations are indicated by the prefix EETS. The EETS course descriptions are listed following the EE courses. The following designators are used for EE courses:
XX1X Electronic Materials
XX2X Electronic Devices
XX3X Quantum Electronics and Electromagnetic Theory
XX4X Biomedical Science
XX5X Network Theory and Circuits
XX6X Systems
XX7X Information Science and Communication Theory
XX8X Computers and Digital Systems
XX9X Individual Instruction, Research, Seminar and Special Project
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Return to: Lyle School of Engineering: Academic Programs
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