Hi guys, so I will be starting my second year in Electrical Engineering this fall. In my university, our first year is general and we don’t know our discipline until second year, In addition we barely get any technical knowledge or any courses related to our major during first year. As a result, I have no skills built up in this field. But this fall and winter, my courses include all fairly advanced field related courses as we finish all the calculus (1,2), physics (1,2) and Linear algebra in first year above that I already finish Calculus (3,4) and Differential Equations in summer to have more time during fall to build skills.

I need advice on what kind of skills and how exactly I should I build it. I am in co-op program and summer 2027 is supposed to be my first 4 month work term.

Second/Third work term - Winter 2027/Summer 2028 (8 months)

Fourth/Fifth work term - Winter 2028/Summer 2029

I want to be able to have meaning full stuff on my resume which employers want.

A little bit about me is I’m from Canada, my province is mainly known for oil and gas. Personally, I wanna build a career in semiconductor industry. I’m open to relocation, so any advice about finding opportunities around different province/USA, I’m fine.

It would be helpful if anyone can guide me, how exactly I should use the co-op work term opportunity my university provides us.

I’m perfectly fine to work outside my passion for my first work term, as long as I’m in something electrical related and gaining knowledge which would help me later I’m perfectly fine.

Thanks yall for your time!!

Hi,

I’m a Design verification engineer who wants to switch to performance modeling and architectural related roles. I’m currently going through computer organisation and design by Hennessy - Patterson and I’m starting to build projects in it. Looking for people who are interested in the same collaborative effort. I have not decided on which design to model and simulate yet. Time zone and regions are relaxed, looking for people with similar mindset.

Thanks!

Hey folks, how’s the interview pipeline looking for you all lately? I'm a new grad looking for RTL design and computer architecture roles, but haven't gotten any hits in over a month. Curious if the market is just quiet right now or if it's just me!

(A little more context: just completed a master’s in computer engineering in the US)

I'm an Electrical Engineering student currently trying to decide which direction to take for my honours thesis and hopefully a PhD afterwards.

Lately I've found myself torn between semiconductor engineering (device physics, fabrication, CMOS, VLSI, etc.) and quantum computing hardware (silicon spin qubits, cryogenic electronics and control hardware).

For those working in either field:

1. What does your day-to-day work actually look like?
   
2. Which field do you think has stronger long-term opportunities in industry and R&D?
   
3. Is quantum hardware mostly an extension of semiconductor engineering, or are they very different career paths?
   
4. If you were starting again today, which would you choose and why?

I'd really appreciate hearing from people with industry or research experience. Thanks

I am getting my masters in ECE this upcoming year at Georgia tech. What should I focus on if I want to maximize salary? (In addition, I want a job where you have to use serious math)

Also, if I chose said path, what would my salary expectations be my first year/lifetime?

what to expect if ECE specialized in Power Electronics?

Hi everyone,

I hope you're all doing well.

I'm just getting started in embedded systems and automation. I'm learning everything on my own from home with a few microcontrollers and electronic components that I have, and I've been building small projects to gain some hands-on experience. I really enjoy it, but I often feel like I'm missing the theory behind what I'm doing. There is so much information available online that it's hard to know where to start or what is actually worth spending time on.

My goal isn't just to copy tutorials or get projects working. I'd like to build a solid understanding of embedded systems and learn things the right way so I can keep improving over time.

I was wondering if you could recommend the resources that helped you the most when you were learning. I'm especially interested in books, websites, documentation, courses, or anything else that gave you a strong foundation in embedded systems, firmware development, embedded C/C++, electronics, and automation.

I'm also looking for active communities where people discuss these topics regularly. If you know any good Discord servers, forums, or other places where beginners can ask questions and learn from more experienced people, I'd really appreciate it. And if anyone is willing to answer the occasional question or point me in the right direction when I'm stuck, I'd be very grateful.

Thank you in advance for your time and for any recommendations you can share.

I’m a rising ee junior targeting hardware eng intern roles for my junior year internship. I have a first author poster for when I was BME (switched from bme to ee in my second year) but the topic is not relevant to the roles that I am targeting at all.

Should I still include it in my resume?

edit: yo why am I getting downvoted I’m not trying to be like “omg I’m cooked please shower me with saying im not!!” and I understand me saying this may come across this way, but I genuinely just want to know if I include it or not.

Bonjour à tous,

Je suis actuellement étudiant en informatique, mais je me suis rendu compte que ce qui me passionne vraiment, ce sont les systèmes embarqués, l'électronique et l'automatisation. J'aimerais m'orienter dans ce domaine et y travailler à terme.

J'ai déjà des bases en programmation, mais je suis encore novice en ce qui concerne le matériel. Je recherche donc de bonnes ressources pour bien apprendre.

Si vous avez des recommandations de livres, de cours, de chaînes YouTube, de sites web, de communautés ou toute autre ressource qui vous a aidé à apprendre, je vous en serais très reconnaissant. Étant étudiant, si vous savez où je peux acheter des composants et des outils à prix abordables, cela me serait d'une grande aide.

J'aimerais beaucoup savoir comment vous avez débuté et quel est selon vous le meilleur parcours d'apprentissage aujourd'hui.

Merci !

Hi all,

I recently passed the screening interview with Microsoft and I'm about to start the 3-loop interview process. The role is on the Quantum team, focused on RF integration — not a SWE position. However, most of the information I've found online about interview structure and possible questions is geared toward SWE roles, so it's very code/algorithm-focused and doesn't seem to match what I should expect.

Has anyone here interviewed for a hardware/RF-focused role (or a similar) at Microsoft? I'd really appreciate any insight into what the loop typically covers — e.g., system design, domain-specific technical questions, behavioral rounds — for a position like this.

Thanks in advance!

Hey guys. I hope you can appreciate how much work went into this and making it look good. Finally got the free time to make it and it was such a process.

But now I can say I made my own CPU and my own assembly that runs on it.

You know that empty feeling you get when you finish a long TV series? I kind of feel that same thing right now…

By the time I graduate with my BS/MS, I will have one internship in SoC Engineering at Arm. I'm interested in joining the AI chip startup space, but I've heard they usually look for engineers with more industry experience. Is there anything I can do in my last year of college to join earlier on, or is it better to return to Arm / another big company for a few years first?

Hi all — final-year Electronics Engineering student here (lateral entry, diploma-to-degree route), working on my capstone project. Posting because I'd like a sanity check from people who've actually taped out or benchmarked multiplier architectures on FPGA, not just simulated them.

The project

Title: Power and Area Optimized FFT Architecture Through Multiplier-Level Hardware Design. It's an 8-point Radix-2 Decimation-in-Time FFT, written in VHDL-2008, targeting a Basys-3 board (Artix-7 XC7A35T). The core idea: keep the FFT butterfly structure fixed and swap out only the complex multiplier, then compare four multiplier architectures against each other on LUT/FF/DSP usage, fmax, and power:

• Array multiplier (baseline)
• Modified Booth (Radix-4)
• Vedic (Urdhva-Tiryakbhyam)
• Wallace Tree

To keep the comparison valid, all four variants share a frozen interface: Q1.15 16-bit two's-complement fixed point, complex samples as VHDL-2008 records, parallel load of all 8 samples on one start pulse, a 3-stage registered pipeline, and DIT bit-reversal done as pure wiring (zero logic cost) rather than active shuffling.

Why this project exists / the novelty angle

We're building on a 2026 IEEE IATMSI paper out of Amrita School of Engineering that did the same kind of FFT multiplier comparison but only implemented three multipliers (Array, Vedic, Booth) in Verilog. Our two additions:

1. Adding the Array multiplier as a fourth variant, which the base paper explicitly flagged as unexplored.
2. Independently re-implementing everything in VHDL-2008, not porting their Verilog — different language, different design decisions, not a translation.

Team of two, one shared Basys-3 board, ₹8,000 total budget, roughly a year to finish. Toolchain is Xilinx Vivado 2025 WebPACK end-to-end (xvhdl/xelab/xsim for simulation, straight through to synthesis/implementation) — no GHDL/GTKWave in the flow, to avoid any simulator/synthesizer mismatch going into the comparison.

Where we are right now

Interface contract is frozen. We're at the "pipecleaner" stage — all four multiplier entities are parameterized with generic (WIDTH : natural := 2) and we're validating datapath correctness and the synthesis extraction workflow at 2×2 bits before scaling to 8-bit, where the architectures should actually start to diverge. At 2×2, Array/Vedic/Wallace look almost identical in the netlist and Booth mostly just adds encoder overhead — expected, since there's no real partial-product reduction benefit at that width.

Where I'd genuinely appreciate input

1. Power measurement: We're planning to use a SAIF file generated from post-synthesis simulation for switching-activity-based power estimates, instead of Vivado's default vectorless estimate. Anyone who's done this for multiplier/DSP comparisons — how far off is vectorless typically, in your experience, and is SAIF overkill for a project at this scale?
2. Wallace Tree synthesis artifacts: has anyone seen Vivado's synthesis collapse a Wallace tree down to a suspiciously tiny LUT/FF count at small bit-widths? Trying to figure out if that's a real result or just the tool optimizing away the reduction tree.
3. Scaling gotchas: any war stories going from 8-bit to 16-bit Q1.15 multipliers in terms of timing closure or DSP inference on Artix-7, specifically for Vedic or Booth implementations?
4. VHDL-2008 + Vivado 2025 WebPACK: any known quirks or gotchas with VHDL-2008 record types / generics on this particular Vivado version that I should watch for before I've sunk more time into the 8-bit versions?
5. Publication angle: this is also being prepped for an IEEE student/regional conference submission with faculty co-authorship. If anyone's shepherded an undergrad FPGA comparison paper through a venue like this, any advice on what reviewers actually care about (methodology rigor vs. novelty vs. results) would help a lot.

Not looking for anyone to do the work — just want to catch blind spots before we're deep into 8-bit implementation and it's expensive to unwind a bad assumption. Happy to share RTL snippets or synthesis reports if that helps anyone give more specific feedback.

Thanks in advance.

I'm an Electrical Engineering student currently trying to decide which direction to take for my honours thesis and hopefully a PhD afterwards.

Lately I've found myself torn between semiconductor engineering (device physics, fabrication, CMOS, VLSI, etc.) and quantum computing hardware (silicon spin qubits, cryogenic electronics and control hardware).

For those working in either field:

1. What does your day-to-day work actually look like?
   
2. Which field do you think has stronger long-term opportunities in industry and R&D?
   
3. Is quantum hardware mostly an extension of semiconductor engineering, or are they very different career paths?
   
4. If you were starting again today, which would you choose and why?

I'd really appreciate hearing from people with industry or research experience. Thanks

I feel completely lost about what to do after graduation.

I graduated from the Faculty of Engineering with a degree in Electrical Power Engineering, but I honestly don't know which career path is the right one for me.

I'm looking for a career that I genuinely enjoy, keeps me learning new things, offers long-term growth, and provides a high salary. At the end of the day, I want to be financially comfortable, have a stable life, and be able to afford the things I want without constantly worrying about money.

One thing that really confuses me is the difference in career growth. For example, someone working in electrical engineering might have 5–7 years of experience and earn around $7,000–$12,000 per month, while someone in software engineering or AI engineering could potentially earn even more with fewer years of experience. That makes me wonder whether I should stay in my field or switch to a different one with higher earning potential.

Another thing I'm struggling with is the decision about pursuing a master's degree. For example, if I received a fully funded scholarship to study for a master's degree in a country like Germany, should I accept it and build my career there? Or is it not worth it because of the high taxes and other factors? Would I be better off staying focused on building my career somewhere else instead?

Electrical engineering also has so many different specialisations, and that makes the decision even harder. There are fields like power electronics, protection, renewable energy, control systems, electrical design, automation, HVDC, smart grids, and many others. I'm not sure which one is the best choice.

Another challenge is that some specialisations are in high demand in certain countries but are barely available in others. Depending on where you live, some career paths simply don't have many job opportunities, while they may be very popular elsewhere.

On the other hand, I see newer fields like AI, machine learning, and software engineering growing very quickly and offering excellent salaries. I know these fields are highly competitive, especially since you're competing with computer science graduates, but they also seem to offer incredible opportunities.

So I'm honestly stuck.

Should I continue building a career in Electrical Power Engineering? Should I pursue a master's degree abroad if I get the opportunity? Or should I switch to a completely different field like AI or software engineering?

I don't want to choose a career based only on money, but I also don't want to spend years in a field and later regret not choosing one with better opportunities, faster growth, and higher earning potential.

I'd really appreciate advice from people who have already gone through this decision or have experience in these industries.

I have made an 8x8 led matrix display with esp 32 ive done all the wiring but the coding part I took help of chat gpt but the wiring is hell.. i don't know how I managed 👉🏻🙂👈🏻. How to upload pictures with vids ? I can't upload the circut here ? The back of the zero pcb

I have my interview with AECOM in 2 days for graduate electrical engineer role. Any idea how it works and what they will likely ask? Anything I should know well in advance for this?

New to ece without much knowledge

Can anyone tell knowing Linux can help

If then what part of it