PhD Engineering

Integrated PhD provides a route into research study if you do not have a Master’s degree, or have very little research training. It enables you to spend your first year completing a Masters-level qualification, followed by a full-time PhD studied over 3-4 years. We also offer a ‘standard’ PhD in this subject which can be studied either full-time (3-4 years) or part-time (6-7 years).

The first year on our Integrated PhD Engineering, enables you to acquire the essential knowledge, skills, competency, and critical awareness necessary for a rewarding career in the electronics industry. We prepare you for a career in analogue and digital circuit design, an area with a major skills shortage worldwide and particularly in the UK.

The content of your first year is far-reaching and includes theory, practice, simulation and realisation underpinned by our 40 years of expertise in electronics and telecommunications. All your acquired knowledge culminates in a project which sees the design, simulation, construction, testing and manufacture of a complex electronic system aimed at the industrial or consumer markets.

In your second year you move into the PhD element of the course. Our research activity and supervision for this course is concentrated in the following principal research areas: audio and video networking, multimedia architectures and applications, data communications and networking, RF engineering, radio, radar and electromagnetics, propagation, video, image processing and computer vision. Our cross-disciplinary projects draw on the expertise of our electronic engineers, computer scientists, mathematicians, physicists and psychologists.

Our research covers a range of topics, from semiconductor device physics, the theory of computation and the philosophy of computer science, computational intelligence and computer games, to artificial intelligence and robotics, with most of our research groups based around laboratories offering world-class facilities. Our impressive external research funding stands at multi-million pounds per year and we participate in several EU initiatives and undertake projects under contract to many outside bodies, including government and industrial organisations.

Studying within our School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering provides both the recent graduate and the practising engineer with the opportunity to gain new skills or enhance existing ones.

There are career opportunities for well-qualified electronics design engineers in the avionics, automotive, entertainment and consumer product markets, and within companies such as Siemens, Fujitsu, Sony, Toshiba, Nokia, Samsung, LG, Apple, Microsoft, Intel, Dell, Sharp, Canon, Acer, Lenovo, Hitachi, Epson, Philips, Nikon, Pioneer, TCL, and JVC, all of whom are searching for competent designers.