Course overview

Computer engineering is fundamental to the design of many of the high technology products we use in our everyday lives: mobile phones/smartphones, computers, cars, home entertainment systems and digital cameras, to name but a few. These devices rely on embedded systems in which computing power is integrated with the product's electronics. You will become an expert in the technologies underlying this type of system which include computer architecture and programming, and electronic design. The first year of your course will give you a good background in digital and analogue electronics, data communications and computing. Subsequently, you will focus on computer architecture, software programming, embedded systems and advanced digital electronics. For more information click on the 'course content' tab. A transfer to the MEng course is possible for high achievers in their first or second year.

The course also includes some business and career related units as well as group and individual projects. The industrial relevance and hands-on nature of this course helps to ensure excellent employment prospects after you graduate.

Projects may also be undertaken in industry or abroad and an optional industrial placement year enables you to put your learning into practice, gaining valuable experience for future employment.

To find out more about placement opportunities in the Faculty of Technology, please visit our Placements Office pages.

Professional accredited course that meets the needs of industry

This course has been accredited by the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) under licence from the UK regulator, the Engineering Council. Accreditation is a mark of assurance that this degree meets the standards set by the Engineering Council in the UK Standard for Professional Engineering Competence (UK-SPEC).

This accredited degree will provide you with some of the underpinning knowledge, understanding and skills for eventual registration as an Incorporated (IEng) or Chartered Engineer (CEng). Some employers recruit preferentially from accredited degrees and an accredited degree is likely to be recognised by other countries that are signatories to international accords.

The School of Engineering

The School of Engineering provides a friendly and supportive place for you to study. Extensive laboratory suites, covering analogue and digital electronics, microprocessors, telecommunications and control systems, give you hands-on experience of electronics. We also have computer suites for ECAD and software development and recently invested £1 million in a new state-of-the-art network laboratory.

We have a well-established research group, active in the fields of Intelligent and Autonomous Systems, Systems Engineering, Telecommunication and Networked Systems and Engineering Education. This research is used to inform all our teaching and contributes to an up-to-date education in an active learning environment.

Home to many high-tech industries, Portsmouth is recognised as a centre for electronic and computer-related business. Our academic staff also maintain close links with the world of work, both locally and further afield. This contact ensures that our courses always reflect the current and future needs of commerce and industry.

Course content

Year one

Core units:

• Writing and Research in the Workplace
• Mathematical Principles
• Concepts of Data Communication Networks
• Introduction to Algorithms and Programming
• Introduction to Analogue Circuits
• Principles of Digital Systems

Year two

Core units:

• Group Design Project
• Computer Architecture and Organisation
• Microcontrollers and Programmable Logic
• Data Networks, Protocols and Analysis
• Collaborative and Pervasive Network Applications

Optional units:

• Engineering mathematics
• Network Simulation and Design Techniques
• Language (not English)

Sandwich year (optional year in industry)

In today’s competitive jobs market, going on an industrial placement as part of your degree programme will give you an edge. You are likely to be more successful in securing interviews, getting more job offers and starting on a higher salary.

If you wish to enhance your CV, gain your industrial experience abroad and acquire some new and/or improved language skills, you might like to consider the Erasmus exchange programme as an option. The Erasmus programme enables all students (UK/EU/international) to study or work in one of the 31 participating countries and also provides a grant for the period abroad to assist with any extra costs incurred. For more information, please visit the 'study abroad' pages of this website.

Our regulations state that you must spend at least 36 weeks on industrial placement in order to satisfy the requirements of the sandwich degree. However, hopefully you will have become a valued member of their team by this time and they may wish to keep you for a full year, or longer. It is also quite usual for the company to be willing to specify and support your final-year project.

The School has an Industrial Liaison Officer who will help place you for your sandwich year and your personal tutor will visit you at least once to monitor your progress.

To find out more about placement opportunities in the Faculty of Technology, please visit our Placements Office pages.

Final year

Core units:

• Individual Project
• Real-time Embedded Systems
• Artificial Intelligence
• Performance and Security of Network Applications
• VHDL and FPGA Systems

Teaching and assessment

You will be taught using a mixture of lectures, subject tutorials, laboratory sessions and project work. You will have about 12 hours of lectures and subject tutorials a week. In addition, there are about six hours of laboratory and computer-based work, usually in groups of about 16 students. A brief description of each teaching activity is given below:

Lectures

Lectures form one means by which course material is introduced and explained to on-campus students. They are also important in that they set the pace of a unit and ensure that you know what you should be studying at any given time. Because extensive note-taking during lectures distracts students from what is being said, we also provide handouts, study packs and web-based support.

Subject tutorials

In addition to the lecture periods, students in large classes may be sub-divided into groups to enable a rostered programme of subject tutorials to take place. These provide the opportunity to consolidate material in a less formal way than is possible in lectures. As well as dealing with individual and small group problems, tutorials will often include working through previously distributed question sheets.

Laboratory work

Laboratory work is of great importance in the formation of professional engineers and technologists. Our computer engineering programme uses a laboratory project-based learning approach for the teaching of core units such as those relating to computing and electronics. With this learning method, students are given a real-world project to work on and are allocated a laboratory work station with all of the necessary equipment to build and test their prototypes. This puts the work in a practical design context from the outset and encourages you to use instruments and read data sheets with clear goals in mind and to work in teams to build your understanding of electronic design. In other subjects, laboratory work follows a more prescribed pattern.

Computing and networking units have significant time scheduled in the appropriate computer suite. Practical computing work often consists of group assignments with a strong design emphasis. You are strongly encouraged to do as much preparatory analysis and design on paper before laboratory sessions, in order to make the best use of the resources. Units which make extensive use of computer aided design techniques also have significant amounts of computer time scheduled for assignment work.

Individual project

The project is rated at 40 credits and takes place throughout the final year. You will use all the knowledge, understanding and skills acquired during the course to tackle and solve practical engineering problems in realistic situations, and with real, time and cost constraints. You are expected to manage your time professionally and maintain a log of your activities.

Projects are exhibited at the School Open Day, an event attended by many major employers from around the country. These events typically attract over one hundred visitors and provide an excellent opportunity for senior engineering recruiters to see the very high standard of achievement of our students.

Assessment

You will be assessed by a combination of coursework and exams. Coursework is undertaken throughout the year with various carefully managed submission points and exams which occur at the end of each year. During group projects you are judged both on your technical and organisational achievement. In the final year you will undertake an individual project that will contribute significantly to your final degree classification.

Career prospects

Placement opportunities

In the Faculty of Technology we feel that students should be given as many opportunities as possible to gain meaningful work experience and build employability skills throughout their studies to make them more attractive to future employers.

Working with other University services, the Faculty’s Student Placement and Employability Centre (SPEC) ensure students have access to a range of volunteering and work experience opportunities, including year-long industrial placements (either in the UK or your home country), and provide support for the different types of application processes.

Examples of roles our students have taken up as placement roles include:

• IT Technician at Nimbus
• Systems Engineer at GE Aviation
• Developer at Smoothwall

Types of placement roles that could be relevant to this course include:

• IT Technician
• Embedded Systems Developer
• Systems Engineer

To find out more about how you can gain work experience whilst studying BEng (Hons) Computer Engineering, please visit our Placements Office pages.

Graduate roles

When you graduate as a computer engineer, your skills and knowledge will open up a wide range of employment opportunities in areas as diverse as:

• consumer and professional electronics
• robotics
• defence
• broadcasting and telecommunications
• the whole information technology sector

You could also go on to do postgraduate studies with us or elsewhere.

Information on occupational profiles can be found on the Prospects website at the following links: Information Systems Manager and Systems Developer.

Purple Door Careers and Recruitment

Purple Door Careers and Recruitment are happy to provide guidance about where your degree could take you. You can also get support with making effective application forms, CVs and psychometric testing.The recruitment team can assist you in finding a job, and they can provide you with graduate employer details. If you are looking to go on to further study they can also provide information regarding postgraduate study and training. You will have access to IT facilities and programmes for careers-related work.

Facilities and features

The School provides a range of facilities to support your learning experience. Lectures, tutorials and seminars take place in the well equipped multimedia lecture theatres and classrooms.

You will have access to a wide range of state-of-the-art laboratory facilities to familiarise you with industry-standard equipment and software packages. The telecommunications and signal processing laboratory is equipped with instruments for generating, receiving and analysing high-frequency signals. Signal generators and spectrum analysers cover the communication bands up to 22 GHz. We also have an anechoic chamber for the measurement of antennas. A range of electronic circuit boards that can be interconnected to form a number of typical communication systems are also available for your use.

The School's teaching of Digital Signal Processing (DSP) is supported by both hardware and software laboratory facilities. The DSP kits will allow you to implement your knowledge of signal processing techniques.

Our digital electronics and microprocessor laboratory has 45 fully equipped benches including scopes, network analysers, PCs and other standard electronic equipment for measurement purposes. There are also hardware/software development tools for design, development and implementation of microcontroller systems. In addition, there are professional hardware/software programming/testing VHDL environments for CPLD and FPGAs devices.

The analogue electronics and control engineering laboratory has 24 fully equipped benches for testing and measurements of a wide range of electronic systems. All benches have PCs with relevant software suites such as circuit simulations (Gesseca, Spice Age, Microcap and Eagle) and control system simulations (ServoCad and Matlab). The laboratory also includes an inverted pendulum kit, Servoset systems, helicopter demonstration and development kits, as well as sets of walking robots to enable you to experiment with a wide range of control applications.

The School has its own autonomous computer network, consisting of about 200 PCs running Linux and Windows. The School runs its own servers for anything that the network needs (DNS, DHCP, Kerberos, NIS etc). The network is a multiplatform transparent network; all computers can be accessed remotely for greater flexibility and use from home. Great care is given to security, with sophisticated Firewalls and VPNs in place.

You will also get the chance to learn and experiment with different networking technologies, as well as learning programming languages such as Java, HTML and C, and use a wide range of application packages such as OPNET and Wireshark to enable learning in all areas of computer networks and communication systems.

Maths Café

The Maths Café is a daily drop-in facility, where you can receive help on any maths or statistics problem you encounter in your studies. It operate in a friendly, informal location and provides handouts on key topics for you to take away. You can also  be shown how to use computer aided learning packages, which can be accessed from any computer attached to the University's computer network.

Learning Support Services

The School of Engineering offers various learning support and further development services to all students. They are additional to the normal academic support provided at all levels within the University, and they are run by teams of selected students.

Entry requirements

View all the entry requirements for BEng (Hons) Computer Engineering for the academic year 2013/14 (opens in new window).