W. Marshall Leach, Jr., Professor Georgia Institute of Technology School of Electrical and Computer Engineering Atlanta, Georgia 30332-0250 Telefax: 404 894 4641
Spring 2007 ECE Picnic - I received the Outstanding Senior Professor Award.

Prospective Graduate Students

Please do not send me requests for admission to the ECE graduate program. I am not involved with applications for admissions. I receive so many of these requests from all around the world that my email program is trained to delete them along with the other average number of 1000 spam emails that I receive each 24 hour period.

Letters of Recommendation

If you are an undergraduate student who wishes for me to write a letter of recommendation for admission to graduate school or for a fellowship, please read this.

Cell Phone Policies

Please turn your cell phone off before entering my office or my classes.

Courses That I Teach

Courses That I Teach This Semester

ECE3050 Analog Electronics

Courses That I Teach Other Semesters

ECE3040 Microelectronic Circuits

ECE4391 Electromagnetic Compatibility

ECE4435 Op Amp Design

ECE4445 Audio Engineering

ECE6416 Low Noise Electronic Design

My Biosketch

You can read my "official" school biographical information here.

Selected Publications

You can see some of the papers that I have published in refereed journals here. The papers with links have been posted because of email requests that I have received.

Audio Related Things

Click here to see a collection of things related to audio amplifiers and speakers. Included are some articles and papers that I wrote and some loudspeaker projects that students built.

The Georgia Tech Parking Office

When I first started teaching at Georgia Tech, a now retired person told me that the non-academic units (which exist only to support the academic units) assume that they are the only reason the school exists. If anyone has ever delt with the Georgia Tech Parking Office, he would realize how true that observation was. One gets the feeling that the people in the parking office are too busy eating M&M's from finger bowls to be of any assistance with any parking problem.

Evaluation Version of Aim Spice

The evaluation version of AIM Spice is a free version of SPICE that some say they like better than PSpice. The evaluation version lets you have 20 active devices (PSpice only allows 10) and 50 nodes in a circuit. The program makes better use of the graphics features of Windows. For example, you can copy plots to the clipboard as metafiles, whereas PSpice only lets you make bitmaps of plots (if you can figure out how to do it). With the graphics post processor, you can scale the plots with the mouse, control the labeling and gridlines, change the axis labels, etc., things that cannot be done with PSpice.

My Information Links

• Linear Technology software page. You will love the version of SPICE they have for free. It appears to have no limits and has a graphical interface.
• Greg's Download Page - A wealth of free software for electronics projects.
• ECAD List - Another wealth of free software for electronics projects.
• Herblock - Famed political cartoonist for the Washington Post from 1945 to 2001. Herblock chronicled a generation of American history in his cartoons that accurately reflected current events, warts and all. He died at the age of 91.
• Dr. Leach's Filter Potpourri. This is a PDF document which might take several minutes to download. I recommend right clicking on the link and saving it to your hard disk.
• The reverse Polish algorithm for Hewlett Packard calculators.
• Atlanta Area Radio.
• Acoustical Engineering at Georgia Tech. The acoustical engineering program was one of several College of Engineering multidisciplinary programs that were set up in the '70s. To my knowledge, none of these programs exist today.
• Superposition of Dependent Sources is Valid in Circuit Analysis. This paper was originally submitted to the IEEE Trans. on Education in early 1994. It was rejected because the reviewer was of the opinion that the methods it described were not valid. A request to have it reviewed again by a competent reviewer went unanswered. It was then submitted to the IEEE Trans. on Circuits and Systems in 1995. The reviewers recommended several changes. The paper was revised and submitted a second time in 1996. The reviewers then recommended that it be submitted instead to the IEEE Trans. on Education. It was submitted again to that journal. The editor rejected the paper without the courtesy of having it peer reviewed. The paper has been published on the internet since late 1996.

• Download a free copy of Scientific Notebook, one of the best and easiest to use techincal word processors that is good for 30 days.

My Weird Science Picks

Some science is weird and some science is not weird. I am entertained by weird science. You can see some of my picks here.

Malicious Software Warning

Do not download and install the video conversion program Super ©. (It may also be called Super C.) This program installs a Trojan on your computer. The name of the Trogan is smab0.dll, and it is installed in the windows\system32 directory. Deleting the file disables the program. The home page for the program can mislead you into believing that the download from their site contains no malicious software. That is not true.

Some of My Nostalgic Pictures of Abbeville, SC

If you grew up in the city of Abbeville, SC during the time that I did, you might recognize some of the people in the pictures on this page.

Some Pictures from My Three Years in the US Air Force

I served as an officer in the Air Force at McClellan AFB in Sacramento, CA in '65 through '67. I worked in McClellan Central Laboratory (MCL) in the 1155th Technical Operations Squadron (1155th TOS). Our squadron was a member of the elite AFTAC organization, which has been described as one of the ten greatest secrets of the Cold War. You can see some pictures I made made here.

Other Links

If a frequency exhibits resonance, it can properly be called a resonant frequency. Can a frequency of resonance be called a resonant frequency? You can read what Harvard's famous acoustician F. V. Hunt had to say about this here. For a weird science definition of resonance, you can read Tom Bearden's definition here.

Making the Grade, by Georgia Tech Physics Professor Kurt Wiesenfeld. Kurt describes his frustrating experiences with students who assume they have the authority to assign their own grades. You can read a student's response here.

Physics 101 Exam. This is a final exam in a senior level physics course taught by Dr. Ronald Edge that I took when I was a student at the University of South Carolina. It was a three hour exam, closed notes and closed book. Each problem consists of two parts, one a derivation and the second a calculation. I would be interested in knowing if the quizzes students take today are as easy as this one.

Lionel's Reading Room. Need I say more?

"This Modern World" by Tom Tomorrow

TomPaine.common sense.

I worked with some great people during my three year tour in the Air Force in Sacramento at the 1155th Technical Operations Squadron, McClellan Air Force Base. I worked in the McClellan Central Laboratory. Some of the pictures of the people I worked with can be seen on this page.

I like this YouTube video that was aired on television in 1975. The band is Led Zepplin.

Here is a second version of the song which has Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, and Betty Boop in it.

Back in the spring semester of 2007, a performer known as T. I. performed across from the Van Leer ECE building. The sound technicians were setting up the high-power system during Dr. Brewer's ECE 3042 class. The class was held in the Van Leer Auditorium directly across from the venue. A student recorded this video that shows Dr. Brewer's response to one of the sound technician's tests. Dr. Brewer doesn't miss a beat during his lecture.

Vote for the Wolfman

This page is not a publication of the Georgia Institute of Technology and the Georgia Institute of Technology has not edited or examined the content. The author of this page is solely responsible for the content. Copyright 2004. All rights reserved.