Integrated design laboratory

Workbenches in traditional student electronics laboratories have supported courses primarily in areas of circuits and electronics. Unfortunately, it has been difficult to design meaningful hands-on exercises for other courses such as signals and systems, communications, control, and digital signal processing using typical workbench setups. This paper describes the development of a new workbench design that effectively supports a wide range of courses in electrical and computer engineering. Each bench is fully integrated through a computer interfaced to IEEE-488-based test and measurement equipment. Additionally, each includes a high-speed data acquisition systems as well as an outboard DSP hardware system. This paper describes the test bench setup and illustrates its use by examples from several different courses.