BME News Highlights

Student Highlights

January 5, 2009

CER grants Technology Fellowship Award for online circuit simulator

Kartik Murari, a BME PhD student, has been awarded a Technology Fellowship Award from JHU's Center for Educational Resources (CER). Kartik's grant is to design an online simulation tool to enhance classroom teaching in the Biomedical Instrumentation course.

The Analog/Digital Biomedical Instrumentation Online Simulator (AD-BIOS) will be a web-based analog and digital circuit simulator for the Biomedical Instrumentation course requiring only a web browser for the end-user. The idea is to create the framework and a library of online simulation modules that can be attempted before an actual lab exercise.

A Java applet will allow the student to simulate assembly of common circuits such as amplifiers, filters, event counters and analog-to-digital converters. Parameters of each of those circuits can be changed by the user on interactive Java-based "breadboards." The student modifies the circuit and selects the type of simulation. Perl and PHP scripts on the webserver convert the circuit on the "breadboard" into a netlist, a document describing the components, connections and parameters of the circuit. This netlist is piped to circuit simulators running on the webserver (Berkely SPICE for analog, GNU GHDL for digital). Output of the simulators is plotted using the utility gnuplot and presented back to the user.

Existing circuit simulators for both analog and digital circuits have a learning curve of their own. The AD-BIOS will make it easier for students who do not have a background in electrical engineering to simulate circuits, making them better and quicker at analysing and designing circuits in the real world. Since the program requires only a web-browser, it can be accessed from anywhere, allow the students to learn to do simulations without taking up time in class.

Posted: January 5, 2009

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