Formal Write-up Guidelines:

You will be required to compose a formal writeup for each of the labs. Formal writeups constitute our primary way of judging the final outcome of your progress in this class. Writeups should be spell-checked, proofread, and presented in a polished form. Your writeups should be a maximum of 4 to 5 pages.

This quarter, we will be using a grading rubric to assess your lab writeups. This rubric will be posted prior to the first lab session. Grading Rubric

Abstract:

The abstract should be brief and direct. Including a one sentence introductory statement is acceptable, but the abstract is primarily focused on your RESULTS. This means measured quantities like THD and Q. A good rule of thumb might be to take the more important topic sentences from each paragraph in your report and string them together in a coherent manner.

ex. A peak detector was built to perform AM demodulation of a signal with fc = 30kHz and fm = 1kHz. Total Harmonic Distortion for a signal with 50% modulation was 13.7%. A 25 MHz resonating LC filter was also constructed and tested. The measured Q factor was 28.9, with the left side band (0.6 MHz) twice as big as the right side band (0.3MHz).

The abstract essentially packs the most important quantitative results of your experiments into a minimum number of sentences (typically, technical conferences give hard limits on the number of words in the abstract). Problems and errors should be reserved for the Experimental Results section and perhaps reiterated in the conclusion.

Introduction:

In most cases an introduction is almost not necessary. If you want to include an introduction, make it short. Keep in mind that this type of paper will be read by technically knowledgeable individuals, so a discussion of the history of AM is best omitted. However, statements about the scope of the work and the targets of study are okay as opening comments.

Design Theory:

The design and experimental results sections are the real meat of your write-up, with the greater emphasis on the results. For the design theory, we want you to show us you know how to design and debug the circuits, i.e. understanding how to interpret the results. What we don't want is a step by step explanation of your work. That goes in your lab notebook. Just present a summary of your calculations, including non-trivial equations to keep the text short. This summary can be enhanced by including descriptions of the importance of various components to overall circuit functionality. Describing what each part does demonstrates your understanding to the TAs. However, do not overdo it! Try to keep things short. Remember, the TAs generally know how things work. Just tell us enough so that we know that you know as well. In this vein, do not restate component values given in the lab schematics simply for the sake of including more numbers in your text. Including a schematic as a figure would be the best way of describing your circuit. Only mention given component values if you are going to explain their contribution to the circuit.

Discussion / Experimental Results:

This is the most important section of your write-up. Frequently, you will be taking a lot of data and making many calculations. PLEASE use tables and graphs to summarize this information and remember to refer to these figures in your discussion. Also, add captions to each figure and table so that its content and purpose is clear. This will greatly enhance the clarity of the write-up. Please also remember to explain your data. Why does the THD change when m is varied? What causes it to increase or decrease? why was the resonance of the tank not at 25MHz? Why was the Q not the same as the prelab calculation? Explaining your data is critical to demonstrating your understanding of the circuit. Undoubtedly, there will be cases where no one has explanations for the data. While this may be frustrating at some level, we appreciate honesty and even occasional humor. In these cases, it is then necessary to discuss what you thought was wrong, what steps you took to fix the problem, what improvements (if any) resulted, and what more could be done that wasn't due to time constraints.

Conclusion:

Typically, for a research paper, the conclusion includes a summary of results and a discussion of future direction. For our case, a summary similar to the abstract and a discussion of problems and sources of error is adequate. It is also good to reiterate any thoughts or points you may have made in previous sections that you feel are especially important or insightful.

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