Integration

This lab is to be done with your group.

You will need the magnifying lens and ruler from your supplies box. You will also need a digital camera (we're assuming someone in your group has one or at least has a camera phone) as well as access to a couple different types of displays (flat-screen computer display, TV screen, etc).

You will be required to answer questions regarding this lab using the class Blackboard site.  These questions are marked in blue.

Introduction

Integration is one of the most powerful concepts in electrical and computer engineering.  It has come to mean building smaller and smaller components onto a semiconductor wafer, or a circuit board, or even a piece of clear plastic like a computer monitor.  As component sizes decrease, the more of them you can put in a given area and usually the more they can do.  An example of integration we want you to investigate is a computer display. These continue to get cheaper and better because they are made with more and more pixels, which are the tiny light emitters that make up the screen.  With a little magnification, you can see individual pixels and uncover how they work together to create the images we are so used to viewing.

Procedure

Pick two different types of screens (TV, computer monitor, cell phone/digital camera screen, etc.) and follow steps 1-3 for each type of screen.    Discuss the questions in each step with your group. 

1. Using the lens provided, observe a computer monitor closely.  You should observe small strips of red, green, and blue (remember, the device must actually be on when observing).  Each pixel on a screen is represented by a grouping of these three lines.  Observe a white spot on the screen, and then observe the two filled boxes below. The black rectangles in the middle are 20 pixels wide and 10 pixels tall.

   

   What color strips are used to produce white?

   What color strips are used to produce yellow?

   What color strips are used to produce aqua?

   
   Pixels should look something like the examples shown below.

   
   

   
   White and blue TV screens at 5x magnification

   
   

   
   Monitor at 10x magnification




2. Measure the dimensions of a pixel.  The way you do this is ultimately up to you, however one possible way to do it would be to pick a particular feature on the screen, count how many pixels are in that particular feature and then measure the feature with the ruler provided.  The colored boxes above have features in them so you can measure lengths and count pixels.

   How large is a single pixel?

   Using your measurements of the dimensions of a single pixel, what is the total resolution (number of pixels) on the entire screen?




3. Take a picture of the pixels in one of your displays (similar to the pictures above) and email your picture to the class instructor.   Getting a good picture may take a little playing around with your camera.  You may need to try moving the camera away from the lens a little bit, in addition to adjusting the zoom.  If you know how, please crop away the excess parts of the picture before uploading it.




4. Even as small as display pixels are, transistors are much smaller. Microprocessors found in current computers have millions of transistors.  The Pentium 4, for example, has over 100 million transistors.

   If there are 125 million transistors in a processor, which has an area of 100 square millimeters (1 square centimeter), what are the transistor dimensions in this microprocessor? Give your answer in nanometers (one-billionth of a meter), and assume that the chip is completely filled with square transistors.

   Note: As can be seen in the picture below, a microprocessor is not fully packed with transistors, therefore, the actual transistor dimensions of this chip would be a great deal smaller (about a tenth of the size) than what you will calculate.

   
   Pentium 4