The faculty of Electrical Engineering (EE) have started implementing a major revision of their BSEE curriculum. The new program integrates engineering analysis with open-ended engineering design projects at all levels of study. Virtually all EE students are required to design, fabricate, evaluate, and test a number of electronic circuits prior to graduation. The current practice of using outside vendors to produce printed circuit boards (PCBs) for these projects is becoming very costly. In addition, students have a very limited amount of time to test their designs, while the high fabrication cost discourages experimentation. The EE department is faced with the choice of severely limiting the complexity of hardware projects or finding a cheaper alternative for rapidly producing prototype PCBs. The equipment used in this project makes possible the construction of an automated PCB fabrication work cell. This rapid-prototyping system dramatically reduces the recurring cost and turnaround time of PCB fabrication and enables students to experience a more realistic design cycle. In addition to supporting the engineering design component of various classes, the equipment can also be a test-bed for the machine vision and factory automation courses. The new video equipment enables students to develop algorithms for a PCB inspection application. The robotic equipment can be used in an existing factory automation class for path control experiments. The new equipment is compatible with commercial grade computer-assisted design packages already in use. It would be reasonable to duplicate this effort at a variety of universities for a reasonably modest cost; this project should attract the interest of many institutions since there is a simultaneous push to increase the amount of engineering design and shrinking of budgets for EE programs.
