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ECE 110 - Introduction to ECE

Area Descriptions

Circuits & Signal Processing

When people often speak of electrical and computer engineering they are thinking of circuits and signal processing. Every division of ECE uses circuits in order to manipulate electrical signals into some sort of data. Whether it is as simple as turning on a light switch or processing a signal sent from your video card to your monitor, circuits are involved. Those who choose to dive farther into circuits can help design integrated circuits, VLSI, and other related devices. They can also choose to study image and video compression and processing, the basis of today’s mp3 players and cell phone.
"I chose circuits because it is mostly design work. You learn the basics and apply them to problem at hand. Also you get to design chips and hardware that you can physically hold after it's all done. The math is mostly algebra for rough hand calculation, and most of the hard math is done in computer simulations. Also can work on making the simulators or just use them. The connections to signal processing is that you can work on implementing signal processing algorithms in hardware or design the ADC/DAC's." --William Eisenhower Grad Student

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