| Programme details | |
|---|---|
| Degree: | Bachelor of Arts (Honours) (BA (Hons)) |
| Disciplines: |
Electronics & Communication
Computer Science |
| Duration: | 60 months |
| Study modes: | full-time |
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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.
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 skill-sets, such an engineer is trained to make design decisions that achieve the best results.
Do you enjoy…
The variety of careers open to graduates of Electronic and Computer Engineering range from designing embedded processors for a wide range of applications, through network design and management in telecommunications companies, to 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.
This degree option blends aspects of both the Electronic and Computer Engineering.
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 world-wide 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 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 (multinational, local company or start-up).
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 (MAI) in engineering and it is here that students get to carry out a major dissertation on a topic of their choice. 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 face-recognition 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: Digital Media Systems; 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.