Electronic Engineering

Overview

Students who wish to study Electronic Engineering apply to the Engineering degree (TR032). The first two years are common to all Engineering students and at the end of the second year students select Electronic Engineering as their specialist area.

What is Electronic Engineering?

Until recently it was possible to define the skillset of an Electronic Engineer as related to the design of hardware chips that could, for instance, be found in computers and consumer devices. In fact it is a continuously evolving profession and is the driving force behind the development of the world’s information technology. Electronic engineers create, design and develop everyday devices like the mobile phone, tablets, game engines and computers. In particular they increasingly design systems which are at the interface between decision making systems and actions in the real world. That means an engineer in this speciality has to also have a working knowledge of software engineering since all engineers now exploit software design to implement ideas and prototypes.

Graduate skills and career opportunities

The careers open to graduates in electronic engineering range from circuit design in semiconductor companies, through network design and management in telecommunications companies, media engineering in Netflix, YouTube and the entire cinema postproduction industry. There are opportunities in business and financial management, where systems for high speed calculations are the driving force behind the modern stock market. Companies employing Electronic Engineering graduates include Boston Scientific, Universal Robots, Xilinx, Intel, Netflix, YouTube, Disney, Ericsson, Analog Devices, Google, EirGrid, SIG, JumpTrading and Accenture.

Your degree and what you’ll study

You begin in the first two years with fundamentals of hardware circuit design and data analysis. You will be given a foundation in how analogue and digital electronic circuits work, test the systems used for high level chip design and even experiment with autonomous vehicle control. In the third year your specialism deepens to include digital analysis of signals as a preparation for Machine Learning in the subsequent years. You will also delve into how information is coded and transmitted in radio links used in mobile phone networks and satellite communication. All electronic engineers must have a working knowledge of software design and so on the computing side, you will learn how the basic analogue and digital circuits combine to form complex processors (CPUs), how these are programmed at machine level (assembly language) and be introduced to fundamentals of software design.

By the time you get to the fourth year, you are ready to undertake a major individual Capstone project which you can choose from an extensive menu offered by staff or you can opt to take an internship with an employer in the computing and electronics industries. You can choose from a range of modules exploring biomedical electronics, entertainment system design, machine learning and reconfigurable hardware design. Students also have the opportunity to choose specialist telecommunications and data analysis modules. Opportunities are offered to undertake a placement in industry or with a research group or to spend some time studying abroad through the Unitech, Erasmus or Cluster programmes. Examples of companies that accepted our students include Intel, SIG, Boston Scientific, and Qualcomm.

The fifth (optional) year leads to a Master’s degree (M.A.I.) in Engineering and it is here that students get to carry out a major dissertation on a topic of their choice. This is a chance to really become a world-class expert in your favourite topic, researching what others have done across the world and building a hardware or software prototype that demonstrates this. As with the fourth year project, the topic could be anything from wireless communications, signal processing systems, biomedical devices and systems, helping to manage huge cloud computing facilities, through novel facerecognition algorithms to uncovering fraud in bitcoin transactions. To support your work on the dissertation, you can take a number of optional courses in the first semester including: Motion Picture Engineering; Speech and Audio Engineering; Wireless Networks and Communications; Advanced Computer Architecture; Artificial Intelligence and Realtime Animation.

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