It is essential that you carefully read through this in order to understand how to successfully complete a lab assignment. All labs follow a specific format and require the following:

1. Completing the lab assignment
2. Completing the lab report
3. Passing off the the lab in person with a TA

Each of these will be described in detail below.

Each lab assignment is carefully designed to help you learn specific skills and apply material you learn in the classroom. They are all organized with the following sections:

• Learning Objectives: a brief summary of the main points at the beginning of each lab.
• Preliminary: prerequisite material or work that needs to be completed before you arrive at your scheduled lab time.
• Exercises: a number of steps to be completed in order to pass off the lab assignment. These exercises build upon each other and should be completed in the order in which they are presented. Most exercises will have questions or design/simulation tasks that are required for the lab report and pass off.
• Personal Exploration: some time spent exploring beyond the lab exercises. Many of you will find yourself naturally exploring during the labs! This personal exploration activity should involve at least 15 minutes of effort beyond the minimum requirements of the lab. You are required to document your personal exploration activity in your lab report. Some suggestions are provided for you but you should pick anything that is exciting to you!
• Pass Off: must be completed in the lab, in person, with a TA. The requirements for each lab's pass off will be described at the end of each lab page. More details on the pass off are described in the Pass Off section of this document.

All lab descriptions contain resources to help you complete the lab exercises including instructional videos, links to external web pages, SystemVerilog files, and code examples.

The lab exercises will frequently ask you to answer questions or complete simple problems. These questions are to help test your understanding and should be completing before proceeding farther in the lab. Students who skip over the questions and proceed directly to the lab exercises will not be prepared to complete the exercise. If you do not know how to answer a question, consult with a teaching assistant, other students, or the instructor. It will be very difficult to complete the lab exercises properly without having a good understanding of the answers to the questions in the lab. These tasks are always colored red and you will answer these questions in your lab notebook and on Learning Suite.

Many labs also contain tutorials. These are intended to teach needed concepts so that the lab itself can focus on putting them into practice. It is very important that you read the tutorials when they are presented. To see a list of all the tutorials, go here. A link to the tutorials page is also included in the sidebar to the left.

Many of the labs discuss topics that are taught in the textbook. References to these sections will be presented with footnotes. ¹⁾

In addition to completing the lab exercises, you are required to complete a lab report.

The heading of each report should include the following:

• ECEN 220: <Semester>
• <Lab #> : <Lab Name>
• <Last Name>, <First Name>
• <Section Number>

Here is an example on how this should be done:

ECEN 220: Winter 2018
Lab #1: Introduction to Digital Systems
Smith, John
Section 1

After the heading, you will need to answer the questions associated with the Preliminary section and each of the Exercises. For each question, copy the question from the wiki page and past the question in your lab report. Place your answer below the question that you copied as shown in the example below:

You may also be asked to insert text, screenshots, or handwritten work you created while completing the exercises into this portion of the report. Here are some tips for adding various media types into your lab reports:

• Inserting Screen captures: Click on the start button and type snipping tool into the search bar. Click on the snipping tool icon. The screen should freeze and turn gray. Now click and drag the cursor over the diagram above. The image is automatically placed into your clipboard, so you can simply paste it into your Word document. You can also save the image from inside the snipping tool app and then insert it into your Word document. Use Word's image tools to crop the image to only include necessary parts of the image.
• Inserting Tables: You can create tables in MS Word using the table tool. You will occasionally be required to create a table in your lab reports, such as a truth table.
• Inserting handwritten work: You will occasionally need to insert handwritten work in your lab reports. You can take a picture of your work with your phone or use the CAEDM scanner to scan your document and add your handwritten work to the report. Follow the Using the CAEDM Scanner tutorial to learn how to use the CAEDM lab's scanner.

At the end of your report you must answer the following two questions:

1. How much time did you spend completing this lab? This question is important for us to gauge the difficulty of the lab and identify when lab assignments are taking too long. Please track the account of the time you spend in the lab in order to accurately report this. Report your result in number of hours (with fractional hours if necessary).
2. Please provide any suggestions for improving this lab in the future. This gives you an opportunity to provide feedback for improving future labs. Student feedback is essential for helping us to improve the labs.

Points will be deducted from your lab report if you do not answer these questions.

Every lab report must be submitted as a PDF file. Files not submitted as a PDF file will not be graded and given a score of 0. It is recommended that create your lab report in Microsoft Word and export your final word document as a PDF file. A Word template file for lab reports is available for you here. This file is also linked on the sidebar to the left.

After completing your report in Word, convert the file to PDF with the following steps: 1. Click the File tab on the top of Microsoft Word. 2. Click Save as Adobe PDF.

Submit this PDF file as your lab report on Learning Suite. Remember, do not submit Word Document (.doc) files or a folder of files zipped together (.zip, .7z, etc.).

Some students have reported that learning suite sometimes fails to upload their lab report. It is your responsibility to make sure that your laboratory report is properly uploaded on learning suite. You should wait and make sure that your report has properly loaded on learning suite.

In addition to completing the lab report, you must have your lab assignment passed off by a TA in person in the lab room. The instructions for what is required for pass off are described in each lab.

Print the Pass Off Sheet that you'll use for all labs in this class. Follow the Printing to a CAEDM Printer tutorial to print to the printer in the lab. Note that the Pass Off Sheet is also conveniently linked in the sidebar to the left. Print one copy of this sheet at the beginning of the semester and bring it to every lab!

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