The final is at 1 pm in Library 41 on Tuesday Dec 4

The final will be in a very similar format as the midterm. It will be about 20% longer than the midterm.

The final will be comprehensive but also weighted towards more questions dealing with material since the midterm. All of the topics listed below are covered in the lecture notes or through your homework assignments.

You may use a calculator if you wish. The exam is concept based, not memorization based. You therefore may bring in two pages of notes with you that you can reference in the exam.

The topics that this exam may cover would include the following (some of these are leftover from the midterm as well)

• Language, communication and protocols
• Information, encoding, archiving, switching
• Ohms Law; concepts of current, voltage and resistance
• Drift velocity in a conductor and a semi-conductor
• Fabrication process steps of integrated circuits
• Calculation of the RC time constant in an RC circuit
  
  
  review this
  
  
• Basic idea/concept of packet transmission
• Error correction in packet transmission
• Signal to Noise issues
• Basic routing principles
• Dissection of network addressing
• Conceptual purpose of the subnet mask ( read the notes; not emphasized in class)
• Structure of the TCP/IP Stack ( read the notes; not emphasized in class)
• Basic difference between IPv4 and IPv6 packets ( read the notes; not emphasized in class)
• Address resolution protocol and how it works ( read the notes; not emphasized in class)
• Basic operational components of a computer and their limitations
• The role of the computer bus in terms of computer functionality
• The memory latency problem
• Possible limitations to moore's law
• Beyond silicon technologies; e.g. carbon nano-tubes, molecular switches, new lithography
• Atomic emission from atoms
• level populations in atoms
• concept of stimulated emission
• role of mirrors in making a laser
• wavelength-division multiplexing
• power of the fempto-second laser in terms of information encoding
• optical fibers and data transmission
• total internal reflection
• the refractive index of materials
• concept of attenuation in signal transmission
• the concept of transmission media
• concept of quantum mechanical tunneling
• concept of quantum entanglement
• difference between classical bit and quantum qubit
• concept of superposition of states
• potential difficulties of actually building a quantum computer
• concept of pervasive/mobile computing
• impact of pervasive computing on society and consumers
• conceptual understanding of eye-brain processing refresh rate and how it can be fooled by displays
• concept of a pixel/voxel
• operational components of a CRT display
• operational components of an LCD display
  
  
  
  
  
  Week 10