An Engineering Team Approach to Mentoring Graduate Studentsthrough Projects

摘要

This paper describes a new approach to the mentoring of graduate students through their master’sprojects recently developed at California State University, Sacramento in the area of integratedcircuit (IC) design. Student engineering teams were formed to design, layout and test twoseparate pipelined analog-to-digital converter chips and a specialized biomedical chip. The goalof each team was to build a complex mixed-signal system on a chip comprising several diversecircuit blocks, with each student taking responsibility for a particular block. The students wereguided through a complete industrial style IC design flow, including architecture, design andlayout reviews. The unique challenge of this approach for the instructor is to guide the studentsto design their individual blocks while insuring that the overall system requirements are met. Forthe students, the advantages of this approach include the experience of working together as ateam, the ability to work on larger designs than a single student could do alone, and theunderstanding gained of several different circuit blocks. The methodology and pedagogicaltechniques developed for this approach as well as a number of challenges which were overcomealong the way will be described. An overall assessment will be presented based on technicalresults achieved, student exit interviews and feedback from industry experts.