Supervisor                       Paul Micallef
Observers                        Paul Debono, Victor Buttigieg

Principal Goals of task    The design of op-amp based active filters

Description of the task One of the most important building block of a digital signal processing system is its front end. This is always a lowpass analogue filter. There are variable requirements due to the fact that the sampling frequency can vary from 10kHz for speech to 44kHz for CD music. There are various types of filter design algorithms such as Butterworth, Chebyshev, Elliptic. The other major considerations is the filter roll-off that defines the cut-off frequency and the stopband attenuation.
The student is expected to use filter tables to find the values necessary for the design . The circuit is then simulated using appropriate simulation software.
The theoretical design is then transferred into a standard biquad section and the values of the RC sections determined.
Eventually the circuit needs to be implemented and tested to the specifications.

Deliverables

1. Report on the use of the filter tables.
2. Choice of filter sections from the table.
3. The opamp circuit analysis and design.
4. The expected sensitivity given the op-amp specifications.
5. The designed circuit

Assessment

• 30 % report
• 25 % simulation
• 30 % circuit
• 15 % presentation

Prerequisites  Familiarity with electronics circuits.

Resources required  Filter Tables Handbook (available in library). Opamp and other electronic components (to be provided); Microsym simulation software (available - public domain)

References                Sedra & Smith  "Microelectronics"; Zverov "Filter tables"; Electronic Devices Handbook.

 Main Subject Area   Maltese language statistical information theory

Supervisor                Paul Micallef
Observers                Victor Buttigieg

Principal Goals of Task           To provide a system that is capable of giving statistical information, (n-grams) on Maltese words and Maltese sentences, and their comparison to English words.

Description of Task           One of the most important building blocks in automatic speech recognition is a language based building block that is built using a Hidden Markov Model on statistics provided from some basic language analysis. The primary aim is to have the statistical information. However if a suitable student is found the partial implementation on an HMM will also be considered. The statistics will be obtained from available maltese and english corpora. Various types will be considered among others:

• n-gram letter statistics for n =2 and n =3 for phonemic classes and directly for the graphemes
• n-gram word statistics based on class representation

1. A program preferably with a GUI interface to facilitate use by non IT people,  that is capable of selecting 2 letters or classes of letters and do an analysis on the corpus to establish certain statistical data, such as number of occurrences, total front letter or back letter occurrences.
2. An analysis on the entropy within groups.
3. An analysis of the statistics and entropy for Maltese and English n-grams to find ways of automatically establishing the language of a word.
4. A report on the findings including the program.

Assessment

• 20 % programming
• 45 % statistics and analysis
• 20 % report
• 15 % presentation

Pre-requisites/Background              CEA 306 and any course on probability and statistics.       Some knowledge of C or C++.
 

Resources                       A computer; C/C++ compiler; Maltese and English text corpora.

References                     Advances in Speech Processing, S. Furui, M. Sondhi  editors

 Main Subject Area      Digital Electronics/Computer Architecture

Supervisor                     Paul Micallef
Observers                     Paul Debono, Victor Buttigieg

Principal Goals of task   The design of a 32-bit barrel shifter type shift-register

Description of task       In today’s microprocessors one of the functions necessary is a shift register that can in one clock move forward/backward by more than one bit. This includes shift left/ shift right logical, arithmetic, wrap-around. There are various ways of achieving this. The aim is to design, test and implement (if time permits) the circuit using PLC’s. The implemented circuit must include overheads such as led’s and extra buffers to be able to use the finished circuit as a pedagogical tool.

Deliverables 

1. The design of the barrel shifter including the truth tables and state tables.
2. The design using logic gates and flip-flops via the simulation tool, microsym.
3. The simulation and testing of the design
4. The report containing the above.

Assessment 

• 25% CL and SL design
• 40% software schematic design, testing and simulation
• 20% report
• 15% presentation

Prerequisites  CEA301; CEM205;CEM207CEM208. Familiarity with microsym software

Resources required     PC ; microsym software (available -public domain)

References      microsym manual;

Main Subject Area        Wireless Communication Systems

Supervisor                     Adrian Muscat
Observers                     Victor Buttigieg, Paul Debono, Paul Micallef,

Principal goal of task   To develop a Graphical User Interface front-end and back-end for an Electromagnetic Simulator.

Description of task The Department of Communications and Computer Engineering is developing its own Electromagnetic (EM) Simulator.  This Simulator could be used to design Wireless Communication Systems components and to model radio wave propagation in free-space. Using this software the communication system under investigation is described in terms of a hardware descriptive language file.  The task of this APT is to develop a graphical user interface for the software. This GUI will make the EM Simulator software more user friendly.  The student should choose ONE of the following GUIs;1. 2D graphical input, HDL and DXF files output2. 3D graphical input, HDL and DXF files output3. Post-processing of simulator output with graphical visualisation4. HDL input, 2D cuts and 3D visualisation output.

Deliverables

1.  The developed software described in the previous paragraph, accompanied by a report describing the operation of the software routines and any special compilation options and some examples used during the software validation stage. The report should also include a listing of the source code.
2. A simple user manual for the software.

• Software programming and development    75%
• Software manual                                        10%
• Oral Presentation                                       15%

Resources Required             PC equipped with WIN95/NT C/C++ compiler

References                An Electromagnetic Simulator for Personal Communication Systems Antennas, A. F. Muscat, QMW, London, 1997.

1. Report describing the operation of the programme
2. System hardware and software

Assessment

• Report                                                 45%
• System hardware and software             40%
• Oral presentation                                 15%

Pre-requisites / Background       Familiarity with the programming language, interface devices such as the PPI, Timer and Interrupt controller chips and interface cards.
 
Resources required                     PC and Flight86 boards plus hardware depending on the topic chosen.
 
References                        8086 assembly language reference book
                                           Peripheral chips manual
                                           Flight 86 reference books
                                           Electronic devices handbook

Supervisor                          Victor Buttigieg
Observers                           Paul Micallef, Paul Debono, Adrian Muscat

Principal Goal of task        To implement and simulate various systems under the Ptolemy framework

Description of task            Ptolemy is a public domain simulation and code generation software developed by the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Berkeley University, USA.    It is a systems level design framework which can be easily extended using C++ code. The aim of this project is to implement, test and simulate ONE of the following systems using Ptolemy:

            1.  A spread spectrum communication system
            2.  A trellis coded modulator/demodulator
            3.  A convolutional codec
            4.  An arithmetic source codec
            5.  A fading channel

It is expected that high order functional blocks present in Ptolemy would be used plus other functional blocks developed by the student in C++.

Deliverables

1. A report giving the theoretical background of the system, a description of the implementation, a description of how the implementation was integrated in Ptolemy, how the system was tested, presentation and comments on results obtained and any conclusions.
2. Source code listings and block diagrams.

• Report                                                      65%
• Source code listings and block diagrams    20%
• Oral Presentation                                       15%

Prerequisites/background               CEM 213 (Digital Communication), CEA 305 (Digital Signal Processing),  CEA306 (Information Theory and Coding).  Familiarity with C++ Programming.

Resources required            Ptolemy 0.7 running under Linux or SunOS 2.5 (this is public domain).  Gnu c++ compiler (gcc).

References    B. Sklar, "Digital Communications: Fundamentals and Applications", Prentice
Hall, 1988, ISBN 0-13-212713-X 025
R.B. Wells, "Applied Coding and Information Theory for Engineers",  Prentice Hall, 1999, ISBN 0-13-961327-