Electronic and Information Engineering Degree Programmes

In this section you can read about the programme structure year-on-year in more detail.

All our degree courses are structured to give you a sound understanding of the fundamentals of the subject in the early years, and then enable you to build your programme around your skills and interests, selecting from specialist modules.

View the complete core programme of all modules, projects and laboratory work in table format.

First year

• a core programme of nine modules, supported by study groups and experiments in the electrical and computer laboratories. You will learn to program in C and become familiar with software design, programming concepts and tool use; skills that will transfer to any programming language/ environment that you encounter.
• the first year project allows you to perform image processing on a configurable hardware board. There is no processor, only a Field Programmable Gate Array. This allows you to do very high performance parallel processing by essentially building your own processor designed to perform your algorithm. Game On: Olivier explains his groups' project - an interactive game.

Second year

• you continue to follow the core programme taking eleven compulsory technical modules.
• the second year project is the IBM Computer Architecture Workshop, run by staff from IBM and Imperial, which gives you the opportunity to apply your understanding of systems architecture, databases, middleware, operating systems and network hardware and software to a real IT systems challenge.

Third year

• you start to design your degree programme to fit your interests and skills in consultation with your personal tutor, selecting advanced subjects from the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering and the Department of Computing.
• MEng students have the choice of  a six-month assessed industrial placement or group project at Imperial College
• BEng students complete a final individual project that accounts for 35 per cent of the final year mark.

Fourth year

• you continue to select further specialist subjects, choosing eight advanced technical options from a selection of around 37 Masters’-level modules taught by the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering and the Department of Computing. You can also participate in the Inter-Departmental Exchange (IDX) scheme which allows you to take modules from other engineering departments in your fourth year. The first three years of your degree programme provide you with firm foundations for a career in your chosen discipline – but twenty-first century engineers need much more. Increasingly, the really ground-breaking innovations are generated when engineers work within inter-disciplinary teams and at the boundaries of their individual fields. The IDX scheme offers you a chance to develop and demonstrate your ability to learn another specialist ‘language’.
• your final individual project is a substantial piece of work that accounts for 33 per cent of the year mark.
• students on the Year Abroad stream will spend this year in an overseas university and complete a programme similar to that offered to the fourth year.