North Carolina State University is developing a digital signal processing laboratory facility to form the nucleus of a state- of-the-art, real-time, real-data laboratory which allows students actual system design and implementation experience and complements the existing strengths in theory and simulation. It is comprised of 15 NeXTstations and one NeXTdimension color station in a local area network with one NeXTcube server as the central controller. The students use the laboratory to perform supervised experiments which demonstrate fundamental concepts (e.g. analog-to-digital conversion, spectrum analysis, aliasing, convolution, sampling) and for their design projects. Typical design projects include: building a modem for a digital PSK system; building a spectrum analyzer; or designing a compression and storage system for images and/or speech.
