Teaching / undergraduate information
Zoya Popović had developed the following courses since 1991:
ECEN 3400, Electromagnetic Fields and Waves I, 1st semester junior, 5 credit (lectures, labs, recitations) core course. Annual enrolment about 100. Together with her father, a veteran of electromagentics, Prof. Branko Popović, Zoya wrote a textbook (about 450 pages) and workbook (about 200 pages) for the course published by Prentice Hall in 2000. The course includes a series of 12 labs and a final project with monetary awards for the best three projects. The Motorola Cellular Infrastructure Division, Fort Worth, has funded internships, class project competitions and lab maintenance, through the efforts of alumnus Steve Dunbar. Spectralink, Inc. from Boulder has donated $12,000 for lab equipment, through the generosity of CEO Bruce Holland. The lab is shared with seniors and grad students so that students at all levels work together.
ECEN 4363, Microwave (Transmission) lab, senior lab, annual enrolment about 50. Most of the labs and lab manual and notes were developed with Prof. Kuester. Profs. Popović and Kuester also obtained equipment donations from HP/Agilent (about $800k). The emphasis of the lab is on microwave measurements and microwave/RF communications. A design final project is part of the course, ending with a mini-conference with paper presentations. A digest of the conference is available on request.
ECEN 5004, Active microstrip circuits for wireless communications, graduate lab course, taught every other year, enrolment about 20/semester. A number of companies have supported the lab with donations (MACom, HP Avantek, Rogers Corp., Arlon). Zoya Popović has pesented conference paper on the class. The students use CAD tools to design and layout all components of a T/R module for communications. They fabricate and characterize the circuits. At the end of the semester, they put together their own wireless voice or data link.
Special topic, Practical antenna design, graduate lab, taught every third year, enrolment about 20/semester. The students use pc-based CAD to design about 15 different kinds of wire and printed antennas that they fabricate and measure. A part of this course is a field trip to the Very Large Array (VLA), the radio telescope in Socorro, New Mexico (the largest telescope in the world currently).
Special topic, RF/optical techniques, graduate course (Spring 1999), covers some common methods and components used at both RF and optical frequencies (wavelengths). The objective of the course is to present two different views of the same electromagnetic technique, phenomenon, or circuit component. Examples of methods that are compared include: Fourier optics and antenna analysis; Gaussian beams at optical and millimeter waves; diffraction theory; and basic field theorems. Examples of components that are compared include polarizers, lenses, waveguides, directional couplers, retrore ectors, phase conjugators, and soliton transmission structures. The course concludes with a conference at which students present project they have worked on during the last month of the course.Industry members judged the presentations, and Best Paper Award was given. A digest of this mini conference was published for assessment purposes. A version of this course was also taught at the Technische Universitat Muenchen, Munich, Germany in Spring 2001.