ECE U401/U211 Report Writing
General Notes:
1. Reports should be typed, but handwritten equations, plots, and circuit diagrams are acceptable.
2. How long should the report be? It should be as short as possible, consistent with completeness. Completeness does not mean including everything, however, it means discussing the important results for your own work. For example, in this lab, you should discuss the important design features and results that define your work (including good results as well as problems). This means that you do not need to review the operation of the entire circuit in detail, but you should discuss your own design choices, what problems had to be overcome, how they were overcome, and what you did to make the circuit operate well. With all this said, I would expect the report to probably be 3 to 6 pages long. The most efficient way to generate a good report is to write a first draft, and then review it with one of us, and then finish the report. I strongly encourage you to do this! This is how we write papers ourselves, with reviews from our colleagues after the first draft.
3. All figures and tables (graphs, circuit diagrams, spice output, tabulated results) should be referred to in the text of the report. For example "Figure 3 shows the distorted sine wave resulting from the limited supply voltage." Figures should have captions, tables should have titles. Again, please ask if you have questions about the format.
4. The format below is recommended. You do not have to follow it if you find a better way to present your results, but this format is fairly standard and makes it easier to be certain that all the required information is present.
Recommended Format
I) Cover Page
Each report shall have a cover page (plain paper acceptable) which will contain the following information.
1) Title of the report.
2) Name of Student.
3) Date.
II) Abstract
An abstract (less than one page - a few sentences). The abstract states the problem and contains a summary of the results. For example, the following is a typical part of an abstract: "The transmitted light was initially modulated at 5 kHz. Further experimentation showed that the receiver was more effective at rejecting stray light if the light was modulated at 20 kHz. This allowed us to increase the operating range from 15 feet to 45 feet.
III) Design (You may use another more descriptive title here.)
Discuss the unique features of your design. For example, the modulation frequency, the Q of your bandpass filter, the gain of the various stages, etc. You can also discuss results along with the design, in which case this is combined with the material described under section IV, Experimental Work. For example: "The highpass amplifier was initially designed with R1=5 kW, but this was changed to 2 kW when the design frequency was increased. We believe that this increased the efficiency of the highpass filter in rejecting 120 Hz noise."
IV) Experimental Work (You may use another more descriptive title here. Also, you may not need this section if you combine the description of the design and the results in one section)
This section contains your experimental results. For example you might state "Inconsistent toggling from the off to the on state was eliminated by inserting a 100 mF bypass capacitor between ground and the -12 V supply immediatly adjacent to the transistor driving the relay."
VI) Summary
The summary is one or two concluding paragraphs to the project. This section describes the work you did and conclusions that you draw from the work. It also includes, in a more descriptive way than the abstract, the results obtained. A typical sentence sequence in the summary might be; "The critical design change in increasing the range from 15 to 45 feet was the increase in modulation frequency from 5 to 20 kHz. This was effective in increasing the range because the gain of the highpass filter could be increased while still effectively rejecting the 120 Hz noise. The other change to the initial design was to ..."