Teaching

Lectures

The LAMI is primarily concerned with the hardware education of students from the Computer Science and the Microengineering Departments. These students follow an electronics course and a logical system course during the first two years of studies. They also get familiar with programming (in Pascal). In the third year, they are exposed to the LAMI courses on the art of programming (in assembler) and interfacing microcontrollers and microprocessors. In the fourth year, they study to the most complex microprocessors and programmable interfaces. They select a project with one of their professors (12 hours a week). A 4 months full time project, the diploma work, terminates the engineering studies.

Four books have been printed, and sometimes translated. This means a total of 7 books, 3 being in English.

Postgraduate courses are offered on the basis of one day of study each week, so engineers active in the industry can more easily follow these courses and the related projects. Three such one-year courses provide a Master's degree. A PhD is obtained by research only, and usually takes 3 to 5 years.

Didactic equipments

Special equipment has been developped since 1970 at the LAMI for improving and complementing the efficiency of teaching, providing students with hands-on experiences that helps the assimilation of theoretical matters and provides a fundation for practical work.

The logidules were developped since 1968. In 1970, a network of 12 Nova minicomputer font panels with a Nova 1200 controller was a really original project that helped us understand the importance of local networks.

The 8080 and Z80 based personal computers we designed since 1974 hence quickly got a local network. The server was in a first step a Nova minicomputer (see the Smaky story).

The drawback of a personal computer is that it hides the processor and makes the low level interfacing programs and interrupts more difficult to experiment with. Hence, a simple modular system, the Dauphin, was designed in 1978 and is still in use for several laboratory sessions. The Cyclope is a simple robot to get familiar with the HC11 programming. A logidule includes a PIC 16C84 microcontroller; a Mubus programmer and the Calm assembles allows to develop programs with a minimum overhead time for students.

Both the Smaky's and Dauphin's have a 20-pin I/O extension connector named Mubus which makes it easy to build and test an interface built with logidules. In a 3-hour laboratoray session, students can design an interface for some programmable device and write some software for it.

J.D. Nicoud April 1997. Send me an E-mail for any question or comment.