Until a decade ago, many if not most of the entering electrical engineering students had background with some form of analog circuitry, e.g., building radios or working on cars. Today, however, the student entering electrical engineering and computer science is far more likely to be from a computer background and more accustomed to a digital world. Based on this observation, the Georgia Institute of Technology [12] introduces electrical engineering to their computer engineering students by means of a sophomore discrete-time systems class.
We are implementing our own sophomore discrete-time systems course that mixes signal processing and communications with computer science and engineering. Our goal is to give the students an intuitive and practical understanding of crucial concepts in discrete-time systems such as the frequency domain, sampling, aliasing, and quantization. The students test concepts in the familiar world of digital computers by programming desktop processors for simulation and embedded processors for real-time implementations.