Overview
The Department of EECS offers three undergraduate degree programs:
- Electrical Engineering (EE)
- Computer Engineering (CpE)
- Computer Science and Engineering (CSE), joinly with the Department of Computer Science (CS) in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Science (Bren:ICS).
1. Three majors:
1.1 EE
EE currently offers five specializations, while CpE and CSE do not have specializations. Note that specializations are not mandatory. The five EE specializations are
| EE Specialization | Faculty |
| Electronic Circuit Design | Ahmed Eltawil, Michael Green, Payam Heydari, Stuart Kleinfelder, Keyue Smedley |
| RF, Antennas, and Microwaves | Filippo Capolino, Franco De Flaviis, Payam Heydari, Peter Burke, Ozdal Boyraz, Chen Tsai, Kumar Wickramasinghe, G.P. Li |
| Semiconductors and Optoelectronics | Peter Burke, Chin Lee, Stuart Kleinfelder, Henry Lee, Ozdal Boyraz, Chen Tsai, Kumar Wickramasinghe, G.P. Li |
| Digital Signal Processing | Lee Swindlehurst, Glenn Healey, Hamid Jafarkhani, Syed Jafar, Ender Ayanoglu |
| Communications | Lee Swindlehurst, Athina Markopoulou, Zhiying Wang, Hamid Jafarkhani, Syed Jafar, Ender Ayanoglu, Ahmed Eltawil |
Reasons for taking a specialization: That is the default path with prepackaged study plan.
Reasons for not taking a specialization: 12 out of 21 faculty ( themselves cover two specializations, so why choose just one specialization?
1.2 Computer Engineering
Computer Engineering offers a broad education that covers both hardwre and software. Hardware includes not only fundamenta EE topics but also digital hardware, architecture, and (embedded) systems. CpE students also get in-depth exposure to a wide range of programming from low-level assembly codig to object-oriented programming, and software engineering in the lower division. This makes them not only solid system programmers in general but also good programmers in general and in specialty (VHDL, Verilog, etc).
CpE faculty include
Mohammad Al Faruque, Nader Bagherzadeh, Aparna Chandramowlishwaran, Pai Chou, Brian Demsky, Rainer Doemer, Jean-Luc Gaudio, Fadi Kurdahi, Kwei-Jay Lin, Athina Markopoulou, and Phillip Sheu. An new Assistant Professor of Teaching in Computer Engineering who will be joining as of July 1 2017 will be Q-V Dang.
1.3 Computer Science and Engineering
The CSE program is joinly administered by both the EECS department and CS department. Students are roughly divided between the two schools. There are two courses that are CSE specific (90 and 112), while the other courses are mapped to other departments. The programming sequence looks more like ICS but hardware courses look more like EE, yet a lot of the administration is done by Computer Engineering faculty rather than EE.
2. Undergraduate Advising
Each year, every student in each of the three majors is required to attend a mandatory group advising session. EE and CpE are done together with students of the same year (fall: freshmen and sophoomres, winter: seniors, spring: juniors), while all CSE students do the same group advising session once per year (usually winter quarter).
3. Senior Design Projects
Senior design projects is a two-quarter sequence (plus upper division technical writing) that gives students the culminating experience in applying what they have learned into solving a real-world problem in a team. Students are encouraged to form teams with those from different majors (CSE, CpE, EE) early and approach faculty to be their mentors. In terms of the course organization,
- EECS 159A / CSE 181A: this is jointly supervised as a lecture course, but in parallel students are expected to develop a project plan with their individual mentor.
- EECS 159B / CSE 181B: this is individually arranged with the individual faculty mentor.
past projects can be found at http://srproj.eecs.uci.edu/