Electronic and Computer Engineering (joint programme)

Overview

Students who wish to study Electronic and Computer 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 the joint programme in Electronic and Computer Engineering as their specialist area.

What is Electronic and Computer Engineering?

Organising both hardware (electronic) and software (computer) components into a useful and productive system is the principal job of the electronic and computer engineer. With a unique combination of both skillsets, such an engineer is trained to lead product design that requires both critical hardware and software expertise. The fundamental skillset of an engineer in this specialty is a capacity to apply mathematical analysis to design problems and the ability to exploit and adapt software workflows.

Do you enjoy:

• Using computers to interface with things in the real world?
• Interpreting data to automate or understand sophisticated tasks?
• Understanding how communication systems work?

Graduate skills and career opportunities

There is a wide spectrum of careers open to graduates of the Electronic and Computer Engineering course. You could be developing reconfigurable hardware for high-speed Artificial Intelligence calculations in the cloud or algorithms for driverless cars. There are also opportunities in business and financial management where the analytic and problem-solving skills of electronic and computer engineers have long been appreciated. Companies employing Electronic and Computer Engineering graduates include Google, Intel, Movidius and Accenture.

Your degree and what you’ll study

This degree option blends aspects of both the Electronic Engineering and Computer Engineering options into one course. You will be given a foundation in how analogue and digital electronic circuits work, delve into how information is coded and transmitted across noisy channels (such as the radio links used in mobile phone networks and satellite communication) and learn how these complex channels can be crafted into worldwide networks, such as the Internet – on which we all depend. 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 how operating systems (such as Linux and Windows) make the machine capabilities accessible for high-level application programmers.

By the time you get to the fourth year, you are ready to undertake a major individual Capstone project or you can opt to take an internship with an employer in the computing and electronics industries (multi-national, local company or startup). You can choose from a range of modules exploring how computers can render complex graphics, how they can see and understand video images and how this can be used with headset hardware for augmented reality. You can further explore how hackers break into computer systems and how to defend against attack. Students will also have the opportunity to choose specialist telecommunications and signal processing modules. There may also be the opportunity 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.

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; Statistical Signal Processing; Wireless Networks and Communications; Distributed Systems; Fuzzy Logic; Formal Methods; Advanced Computer Architecture; Networked Applications; Artificial Intelligence and Real-time Animation.

Click here for further information on modules/subject.