Electrical and Computer Engineering

In one line: Electrical and computer engineers move energy and information with electrons. They work from a few circuit laws up through devices, logic and processors to the software that runs on them.

Core idea

The discipline spans:

• circuits and electronics
• electromagnetics and radio frequency (RF)
• signals and communications
• power systems
• controls
• digital design and computer architecture
• embedded systems

The course’s goal for non-specialists is practical: enough understanding of circuits, devices and embedded systems to work effectively on multidisciplinary design, development and manufacturing teams.

Four quantities underpin everything:

• Charge, in coulombs. One coulomb is about $6.24\times 10^{18}$ electrons.
• Current: the rate of flow of charge, in amperes. One ampere is one coulomb per second.
• Voltage: the energy per unit charge, in volts.
• Power: the product of the two, $p=vi$, in watts.

Energy is power integrated over time, and in any circuit it is conserved: the power delivered equals the power absorbed.

How it works

The course climbs a ladder of abstraction:

1. Circuit laws and analysis: Ohm’s law, Kirchhoff’s laws, and systematic methods such as Nodal Analysis.
2. Energy-storing elements: capacitors and inductors, transients and resonance (see RLC Circuits).
3. The analog building block: Operational Amplifiers, used for amplifying, filtering and conditioning sensor signals.
4. Devices: diodes and transistors (see Semiconductor Devices), the switches and amplifiers everything else is built from.
5. Logic: gates, counters and processors (see Digital Logic).
6. Software meets hardware: Embedded Microcontrollers.

A side trip into transmission lines, the Smith Chart, shows how radio and microwave engineers handle signals whose wavelength is comparable to the circuit itself.

In practice

Everyday examples make the abstraction concrete:

• a car headlight circuit, from its physical wiring to its schematic
• a timer chip that sets the delays in a remote control
• an electrocardiogram amplifier that picks out a millivolt heart signal from much larger interference

The leadership skill is knowing which questions expose risk: power budgets, noise, timing margins, and where the hardware–software boundary sits (see Software in Engineered Products).

Questions to ask the experts

• What is the power budget, and where does the heat go?
• What is the smallest signal we must measure, and what noise competes with it?
• Which functions are in hardware and which in software, and why?

Connections

• Topics covered: Nodal Analysis, RLC Circuits, Operational Amplifiers, Semiconductor Devices, Digital Logic, Embedded Microcontrollers, Smith Chart.
• The person behind the chart: Phillip H. Smith. Why a leader learns this: T-Shaped Professional.
• Capabilities exercised: Connecting Across Disciplines, Inquiry, Decision Making.

Sources

• Course lectures on electrical and computer engineering; no public source.