Why Become an Electrical Engineer!
Microelectronics
Microelectronics engineering deals with the design and micro-fabrication of very small
electronic circuit components for use in an integrated circuit or sometimes for use on their own as a general electronic component. The most common microelectronic components are semiconductor transistors, although all main electronic components (resistors, capacitors, inductors) can be created at a microscopic level.
Microelectronic components are created by chemically fabricating wafers of semiconductors such as silicon (at higher frequencies, compound semiconductors like gallium arsenide and indium phosphide) to obtain the desired transport of electronic charge and control of current. The field of microelectronics involves a significant amount of chemistry and material science and requires the electronic engineer working in the field to have a very good working knowledge of the effects of quantum mechanics.
Microelectronics engineering deals with the design and micro-fabrication of very small
electronic circuit components for use in an integrated circuit or sometimes for use on their own as a general electronic component. The most common microelectronic components are semiconductor transistors, although all main electronic components (resistors, capacitors, inductors) can be created at a microscopic level.
Microelectronic components are created by chemically fabricating wafers of semiconductors such as silicon (at higher frequencies, compound semiconductors like gallium arsenide and indium phosphide) to obtain the desired transport of electronic charge and control of current. The field of microelectronics involves a significant amount of chemistry and material science and requires the electronic engineer working in the field to have a very good working knowledge of the effects of quantum mechanics.
Signal processing
Signal processing deals with the analysis and manipulation of signals. Signals can be either analog, in which case the signal varies continuously according to the information, or digital, in which case the signal varies according to a series of discrete values
representing the information. For analog signals, signal processing may involve the
amplification and filtering of audio signals for audio equipment or the modulation and
demodulation of signals for telecommunications. For digital signals, signal processing may
involve the compression, error detection and error correction of digitally sampled signals.
Signal Processing is a very mathematically oriented and intensive area forming the core of Digital Signal Processing (DSP) and it is rapidly expanding with new applications in every field of electrical engineering such as communications, control, radar, TV/Audio/Video engineering, power electronics and bio-medical engineering as many already existing analog systems are replaced with their digital counterparts.
Although in the classical era, analog signal processing only provided a mathematical
description of a system to be designed, which is actually implemented by the analog hardware engineers, Digital Signal Processing both provides a mathematical description of the systems to be designed and also actually implements them (either by software programming or by hardware embedding) without much dependency on hardware issues, which exponentiates the importance and success of DSP engineering.
The deep and strong relations between signals and the information they carry makes signal processing equivalent of information processing. Which is the reason why the field finds so many diversified applications. DSP processor ICs are found in every type of modern electronic systems and products including, SDTV | HDTV sets, radios and mobile communication devices, Hi-Fi audio equipments, Dolby noise reduction algorithms, GSM mobile phones, mp3 multimedia players, camcorders and digital cameras, automobile control systems, noise canceling headphones, digital spectrum analyzers, intelligent missile guidance, radar, GPS based cruise control systems and all kinds of image processing, video processing, audio processing and speech processing systems.
Telecommunications
Telecommunications engineering focuses on the
transmission of information across a channel
such as a coax cable, optical fiber or free space.
Transmissions across free space require
information to be encoded in a carrier wave in order to
shift the information to a carrier
frequency suitable for transmission, this is known as
modulation. Popular analog modulation
techniques include amplitude modulation and frequency
modulation. The choice of modulation
affects the cost and performance of a system and these two
factors must be balanced
carefully by the engineer.
Once the transmission characteristics of a system are determined, telecommunication
engineers design the transmitters and receivers needed for such systems. These two are sometimes combined to form a two-way communication device known as a transceiver. A key consideration in the design of transmitters is their power consumption as this is closely related to their signal strength. If the signal strength of a transmitter is insufficient the signal's information will be corrupted by noise.
Once the transmission characteristics of a system are determined, telecommunication
engineers design the transmitters and receivers needed for such systems. These two are sometimes combined to form a two-way communication device known as a transceiver. A key consideration in the design of transmitters is their power consumption as this is closely related to their signal strength. If the signal strength of a transmitter is insufficient the signal's information will be corrupted by noise.