Electronic Systems Engineering

OBJECTIVES

Embedded applications are calling for an increasing number of specialized electronic systems. Standard, off-the-shelf solutions are rarely able to meetthe expectations and demands for functionality, performance and energy dissipation that customers make on such systems. Electronic system design demands a tight integration on a very large profile of knowledge and skills ranging from hardware and software system architecture to semiconductor physics. Functionality of complex embedded or stand-alone systems, to be applied in areas such as general-purpose computing, telecommunications, automotive, entertainment, and multimedia, may be realized by various combinations of analog and digital hardware and software parts. Systems can be implemented by single or multiple integrated circuits and software modules that can be either of special purpose, programmable or reconfigurable.In the current and coming decades VLSI design, which currently enables us to build million-transistor chips, will become Gigascale (GSI) design and Terascale Scale Integration (TSI) design, respectively. In this context VLSI design can signifies more than one billion and one trillion devices per chip, respectively. From a system design perspective, this increase in integration levels is qualitatively different from past integration improvements of similar magnitudes.

In particular, manufacturing defects will increase, devices will get less reliable, interconnect will be orders of magnitude slower than transistors, new nanotechnologies will emerge, and signal and power management issues will be aggravated.

The complexity of electronic designs and the number of technologies that must be mastered to bring to market winning products have forced electronic companies to focus on their core competence. Product specification, IP creation, design assembly and manufacturing are, for the most part, no longer taking place in the same organization. Indeed, the electronic industry has been disaggregating from a vertically oriented model into a horizontally oriented one for a few years. Integration of the supply chain is today a serious problem. Time-to-market pressure, design complexity and cost of ownership for masks are driving towards more disciplined design styles that favor design re-use and correct-the-first-time implementations. The quest for flexibility in embedded system design coupled with the previous considerations is pushing the electronic industry towards programmable solutions for a larger class of designs than ever before.

Embedded systems are gaining increasing importance in all aspects of engineering. It is expected that in the near future roughly no technical artifact will exist without embedded information technology. There is a tendency to software oriented embedded and/or dependable systems, based on standardized micro-controller cores. This implies that the design of embedded real-time software and real-time operating systems will play a dominant role in this field. As more and more networks of micro-controllers are applied, real-time communication systems and in general the design of distributed embedded systems will gain importance. As high-performance embedded computing components have become available the challenges of designing embedded systems have become more acute. The Electronic System Engineering program caters all the above mentioned needs.

Approved Courses

• ME in Electronic Systems Engineering