Communication System Design

Catalog description

This course is for students in Electrical Engineering Technology to gain understanding of the fundamental concepts and components of communication systems, supported by hands on experiments. Fundamentals of communication systems are covered and include signal analysis, noise, main building blocks and circuit components, effect of nonlinearities, signal generation, concepts of modulation and demodulation, analog modulation schemes such as AM, DSB, SSB, FM, and PM, transmitter and receivers architectures, and, if time permits, an introduction to digital communication schemes. After overviewing basic terminology and concepts such as signal spectrum, bandwidth, filtering, harmonics, power, and signal to noise ratio in communication systems, this course, in two parts, will expose students to two distinct aspects of communication technology. In the first part, the students will learn about the main components such as filters, resonators, amplifiers, mixers, oscillators, and phase locked loops. The second part will cover the main amplitude and angle modulation schemes and familiarize the students with modulator and demodulator circuits for those schemes. Topics covered in the course are supported by hands on labs performed each week during a lab session.