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An Education Module On Engineering Ethics Concentrating On Environment Friendly Engineering For VLSI Design Course

Authors: Karthikeyan Lingasubramanian and Sanjukta Bhanja

Nano Computing Research Group (NCRG)

Department of Electrical Engineering

University of South Florida

Class Notes:

The lecture was provided through a power point presentation which emphasizes the ethical responsibilities of an electronic engineer towards environment through information on environmental hazards due to electronic devices and some possible design methodologies to control them. The module is divided into six sub-modules, each concentrating on a specific topic as follows,

  • Ethical Responsibilities
  • E-Waste
  • Lead-Free Electronics
  • Low Power Electronic Circuit Design
  • Data Centers
  • Legislations for Environment Friendly Electronics

The entire education module is 60 minutes long followed by a 15 minutes session for students to complete a questionnaire used to evaluate the students and obtain feedback from them.

View Slide

E-Waste video from “60 Minutes” show in CBS

Data Center video from IBM

Data Sheets:

Questionnaire:

The questionnaire consisted of 16 evaluation questions and 4 feedback questions.

Evaluation:

These questions were asked  to evaluate the student's understanding towards the topics that are discussed in our education module. Rubrics for each question are formed by providing grades A, B or C. Our main goal is to gauge the amount of knowledge acquired by the students through the proposed education module. So the questions are designed in such a way that there are possibilities of partially correct answers yielding grade B, which eventually means that the student has acquired some useful knowledge of the topic as opposed to none. The following table gives the number of questions asked in each topic.

 

Ethical Responsibilities

2

E-Waste

3

Lead-Free Electronics

3

Low Power Electronic Circuit Design

3

Data Centers

3

Legislations for Environment Friendly Electronics

2

Feedback:

To obtain the student’s feedback, they were asked the following questions.

1)      Do you think this exposure was helpful to understand some of the ethical issues as a VLSI Designer?

    • a.       Very Helpful
    • b.      Somewhat helpful
    • c.       I already knew most of it
    • d.      No use at all

2)      In future do you like more emphasis of which of the following area

    • a.       Design issues of Lead-free computing
    • b.      Just enough energy computing
    • c.       Knowing more about laws
    • d.      Low power design issues
    • e.       Cooling techniques

3)      What is the most important take-home message of this environment-friendly green computing knowledge module?

4)      Any suggestions:

Sample Questionnaire:

 

Sample 1

Sample 2

Sample 3

Sample 4

Sample 5

This website details research activities performed using the infrastructure acquired through the National Science Foundation Computing Research Infrastructure (CRI) grant # 0551621

Disclaimer: This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0736971