William McGahey

Phone: 412-624-9697
Email:wem@pitt.edu

This laboratory in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, directed by Alex Jones, PhD, provides the hardware and software necessary for students to design and build digital circuits. It is used in two undergraduate laboratory courses where students are provided with an understanding of the three-way relationship between the mathematical abstraction of logic as expressed in Boolean algebra, schematics and simulations using CAD tools, and the physical realization of these circuits in hardware. The facility contains 24 networked high-performance workstations, complete with logic analyzers, oscilloscopes, and related equipment used to design, breadboard, and test digital circuits. In addition, the laboratory contains complete support for both Altera and Xilinx Field Programmable Gate Array system development. Finally, a full complement of software, including the Mentor Graphics Design Tools and the Microsoft Visual Studio, is available which allows students to simulate their designs and develop new hardware and software systems. This laboratory was created through a generous gift from John A. Jurenko, a Pitt alumnus and friend of the University.