Electronic and Information Engineering - The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Facilities and Laboratories

The Department presently occupies 1130 square meters of space for staff offices, and 2280 square meters for laboratories. The laboratories are:

The major items of equipment in each major discipline are:-

Circuit Research Laboratory (DE506)

A comprehensive range of circuit design and development facilities, including programmable power supplies, AC power analyser, AC/DC current probes, electronic loads, high-performance digital and analog oscilloscopes, high-end computers and workstations, etc.

Common First Year Laboratory (CF004)

91 sets of PCs are installed with Microsoft Windows XP and Microsoft Visual Studio. In addition, NetBeans IDE and OrCAD are also available for Java program developments and PSpice circuit simulations respectively. All students' PCs are connected to the teacher's PC using Muse such that teacher can communicate effectively with students in class for the teaching of software packages. To facilitating teaching, two sets of remote controlled projects/screens together with a Personal Response System are installed on site permanently.

Communications Laboratory (DE502)

An extensive range of microwave equipment and network analyzers covering 0.1MHz to 12GHz, including an HP8510C network analyzer system, Tektronix 2794 spectrum analyzer, Rohde & Schwarz FSH6 Spectrum Analyzer, HP 89441A Vector Signal Analyzer and Rohde & Schwarz SMIQ03 Signal Generators are available. An experimental satellite receiving station, other items include DEGEM DIGICOM digital communication experimental setup, HP4951C protocol analyzers, an IDACOM ISDN analyzer and an HPLAN analyzer.

Digital Signal Processing Laboratory (DE503�V4)

The Digital Signal Processing (DSP) Laboratory was established in early 1997. The DSP laboratory, which occupies an area of more than 184 square meters, will be used mainly to support the research, teaching and exhibition of the State-of-the-art of Digital Signal Processing with an emphasis on multi-media applications. Various demonstration units have been installed in the laboratory for the aforementioned purposes. They include a High Definition Television (HDTV) system, a video conferencing system, a speaker verification system, face recognition system, intelligent karaoke system etc., which demonstrate the research achievements of the department in these areas. All of these systems will be supported by a network of high performance servers, workstations and Multimedia Personal Computers. Advanced graphic and DSP development software has been installed to support the research and teaching using these computing facilities.

EIE General Teaching Laboratories (CF005, CF005a, CF105 and CF105a)

A laboratory that can accommodate over 100 students for teaching electric circuit. The Department runs four EIE General Teaching laboratories in which totally 100 sets of PCs are installed. These PCs are fully equipped and connected to different servers. Up-to-date software packages including MS VC++, C, VB, J++ compilers, Matlab (with full spectrum of toolboxes), word processing packages, networking tools, as well as general UNIX utilities are provided through the servers. These laboratories support teaching in all areas of subjects.

Electronics and Telecommunications Research Laboratory (EF502)

This is the largest research laboratory of the Department. Activities are mainly focused on power electronics and communications. The laboratory houses most prototyping and test equipment for power electronics research in the low to medium power range, including BH characterizer, PCB tools, network analyzer, impedance analyzer, high power current loads, programmable and dc power supplies, DSOs, current probes, burn-in tester, etc. It also has the state-of-the-art equipment for communication systems research, including spectral analyzer, antenna sets, UWB test set, etc.

This laboratory features a big display cabinet for antique electronic instruments and components kept by the Department such as vacuum tubes, a wheatstone bridge, a core memory, and many other exhibits with a long history.

Interactive Multimedia Laboratory (DE505a)

This laboratory is newly established to support the teaching and research of interactive multimedia technologies. The laboratory is equipped with a wireless motion tracking system which is wearable by users of the laboratory for detection of the positions and orientations of up to 8 markers. The laboratory also features a panoramic video projection system to support wide-screen video display. A voice recognition system is also installed to enable a different form of human-computer interaction. Typical activities in the laboratory include interactive 3D game development, advanced human-computer interface research, and research on human motion and posture.

Microfabrication Laboratory (BC701�V4)

Maintained with a clean room environment, there are furnaces, mask aligner, sputterer, e-beam and thermal deposition systems. Other major facilities include molecular beam epitaxy system, metalorganic chemical vapour deposition system, semiconductor optical and electronic characterization equipment.

Optical Communications and Networking Research Laboratory (EF503)

The laboratory is equipped with the state-of-the-art equipment in optical fiber communications. There are three testbeds: a high speed dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) circulating loop optical fiber transmission testbed, a high speed all-optical packet switching testbed, and an ATM testbed with a total value over HK$20 millions. Other major equipment items include one 10 Gb/s bit-error-rate testset, two additional 10 Gb/s pattern generators, a 50 GHz RF spectrum analyzer, a 50 GHz wideband oscilloscope, a 160 Gb/s laser source, a 160 GHz multiplexer, a 40 GHz electrical signal generator, a high-resolution multi-wavelength meter, two polarization analyzers, a polarization maintaining fusion splicer, a 2.2 W Raman laser, optical spectrum analyzers, tunable lasers, an ATM simulator/tester, and ATM switches.

Project and Multimedia Teaching Laboratory (CF502/503) more...

Project and Multimedia Teaching Laboratory is dedicated for the teaching of IT related subjects. There are 80 sets of PCs installed with hardware and software for basic multimedia computation in these two laboratories. All PCs are networked and connected to servers to allow sharing of resources of the laboratories. Modern multimedia application development tools and software packages are also provided in these laboratories.

Research and Project Laboratory (EF501) more...

This laboratory is mainly designed for undergraduate students to conduct their final-year projects, where they may design and build hardware, and perform testing for their projects. A comprehensive range of development tools, equipment, and computers including hand tools, a universal programmer, a de-soldering station, 36 PCs, and 18 sets of general-purpose equipment, is available for conducting research as well as student projects. The general-purpose equipment in this laboratory includes oscilloscopes, power supplies, signal/function generators, and frequency counters.

The laboratory is at a prime location of the Department. It serves as an exhibition venue to display students' work and final-year projects for demonstration to visitors from secondary schools, industry and other professional and engineering sectors.

Robotics and Control Laboratory (CF505)

The Robotics and Control Laboratory is recently established to support the teaching and research development in robotics and embedded controllers. Equipment housed in this laboratory include PCs for embedded programming and circuit board designs, embedded controller development kits, various robotics exploration kits, a set of video projection equipment, a handful of digital oscilloscopes and a good variety of general-use electronic instruments. For teaching, there are also feedback servo systems, instrumentation panel trainers and a few Analog Computer trainer kits. This laboratory keeps a good stock of many types of robotic sensor modules, servos, electromechanical drivers, electronic components and mechanical parts. Major activity in the laboratory is robots development through which students gain valuable experience, particularly from participating in in-house competitions as well as external competitions such as the inter-university robots contest "Robocon". The laboratory also displays embedded controllers and robots developed by students.

Virtual Reality Laboratory (CD515)

This laboratory is newly established for the teaching and development in the area of virtual reality. The laboratory houses 8 sets of iMac computer installed with Apple OS and Microsoft Window OS, a 120-inch projector screen with a stereo-vision projector arrangement, a 4D video box with polarized stereo-video system and a motion bench, a head-mount display unit, a shutter glass unit, 3D motion sensor systems, a 35 mm 3D camera, a 3D camera attachment for Nikon and Canon SLR mount, and a 3D lens attachment for digital video camcoder. More equipment are planned to be added to the laboratory, including a header tracker system, a Nantendo Wii system with sport pack, a Microsoft flight simulator with interfaces, and multi-channel audio systems, etc.

VLSI Design Laboratory (CF504)

Our major computer systems and workstations are located in this laboratory. They include Sun Sparc Workstations (SPARC 1000/20/10/2 and etc.), development systems for 32/16/8-bit general-purpose microprocessors and 8-bit single chip microprocessors, Desktop Computers, Programming and development facilities for PROM and EPLD, and Transputer development facilities. 16/32-bit Digital Signal Processing facilities, mono and full colour image processing systems are also available.

The system drive C: (Windows XP Professional) is protected by a ��Reborn�� feature, which means that drive C: will be restored to the default every day. If students want to keep their data on the computer they are using, they should save them on drive D: (SAVED_DATA), or should back up their files to external storages.

Updated on 31 January 2007