The Department of Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineering at the University of Pretoria in South Africa has a proud history of producing world-class engineers for all three of these disciplines of engineering. Most of our graduates are leaders in engineering and also top inventors and entrepreneurs in the world.

The Department has designed and optimised our undergraduate degree programs to prepare our graduates in the best possible way for their careers – discipline specific, locally relevant, and internationally competitive. The result is that we have three specialist degrees – Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineering. This assures very little competition from generalist engineers from other institutions when entering the labour market – “you know the discipline, you have experienced research and experimentation in the best possible laboratories for your career.”

A key difference in obtaining an engineering qualification from an institute like ours is the graduate can register as a Professional Engineer (versus Professional Technologist, etc). To grasp on the differences, consult the website of the Engineering Council of South Africa (ECSA), www.ecsa.co.za

Our success over many years has been proven to be a result of the quality of our lecturers and support staff (see Personnel). The lecturers in the Department are outstanding: most lecturers have PhD degrees (some lecturers have two PhD’s) or are currently pursuing PhD degrees, many are NRF (South African National Research Foundation) rated researchers and are registered Professional Engineers. We have the whole range of lecturers from very young to some close to 60 years of age; male female; racially and culturally diverse. Our lecturers are excellent lecturers, well-established researchers, innovative and constantly consulted by Government, Industry and many other institutions. A constant flow of new patents are registered by lecturers and students from our Department. Some of these are currently under development with support from the University of Pretoria and venture capital companies for many millions of Rands.

The other two components to assure outstanding achievement and quality graduates, are:

• Quality training and research laboratories; as well as a large number of Centres of Excellence in the Department (see Institutes and Centres for more information).
• Quality students at undergraduate and postgraduate level.

The Department is a strong supporter of the IEEE as well as the SAIEE. The IEEE (Institute of Electrical & Electronic Engineering) is the largest professional society of any discipline in the world. Members of our staff occupy key positions in the IEEE and they publish most of their research papers in IEEE Journals. The Computer Society of the IEEE caters for all sub-fields of Computer Engineering and it is one of the largest IEEE Societies in the world.

Electrical Energy has proven to be the cheapest and cleanest source of energy (in generation, storage, transmission, distribution and utilisation). The worldwide interest in clean / renewable energy and the sustainable use of energy efficiency has created a tremendous increase in job opportunities and research possibilities. This will carry on for all future generations.

Electronic systems have grown from simple analogue amplifiers and digital circuits, to electronics controlling every conceivable technology and system you can imagine – be it sensing or measuring, amplification, transmission and reception, controlling drives or car ABS (automatic braking systems) – it is electronic engineering. The Department has identified a number of crucial Electronic Engineering sub-fields for our focus and research; these include telecommunications, signal processing, electromagnetism and radar, electronic warfare, control and automation, micro- and nanoelectronics, biomedical engineering, photonics and optical fibre networks. The Communication Society (ComSoc) of the IEEE caters for all sub-fields of Communication and is also one of the largest IEEE Societies in the world.

Computer Engineering (also called ICT engineering) has been identified as an engineering discipline growing in importance since 1985 (first as a postgraduate program and since 1998 also as a separate undergraduate engineering discipline). Computer systems (embedded to clusters and mainframes), computer networks, intelligent systems and software engineering have been identified as focus areas of the Department.

The Computer Aided Education Centre (CAEC) is equipped with 144 work stations including National Instruments ELVIS circuit emulation units, assuring we have a world class laboratory for computer education and experimentation.

The Cisco Computer networking laboratory (which hosts the Cisco Regional Academy at UP – first of its kind in Africa) is world class and provides outstanding networking research and training for Computer Engineers from all over South Africa, Africa and the world.