CENG Technical Electives

Computer Hardware

Computer hardware is the electronic circuits of computers and other electronic processing systems. They are the integrated circuits (ICs), CPUs, and their dedicated software and firmware. The hardware can be a system on a chip (SoC), which is an IC that is composed of a CPU, memory, I/O, and peripheral circuits. It can be high performance computers such as multi-core computer chips, massively parallel computers, and specialized processors such as graphics processing units (GPUs). There is a wide range of applications, from tiny low-power sensor modules used for environmental or personal health monitoring to large computing centers used for machine learning, data science, artificial intelligence, and computer animation. Computer hardware is a necessary technology in our day-to-day lives as we need our smart phones, laptops, auto electronics, smart appliances and the Internet.

Electronic design automation is a category of software tools for designing computer hardware. They cover design, simulation, analysis and verification, manufacturing preparation, and functional safety. Modern tools include hardware description languages such as VHDL and SystemVerilog, and verification tools such as Universal Verification Methodology (UVM). Employment opportunities include all electronics companies involved with Field Programmable Gated Arrays (FPGAs), SoCs and Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs).

Cyber-Physical Systems and the Internet of Things

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) combine sensing, computation, physical components with networking technologies to transform the way people interact with engineered systems, just as the Internet has transformed the way people interact with information. As CPSs are connected to the Internet, the state of the real world is rapidly becoming accessible and controllable online in real-time. This evolution of the Internet, known as the Internet of Things (IoT), is already well underway, with the current 10 billion connected devices forecast to grow to between 30 and 50 billion units by the year 2025. As this growth continues, CPS and IoT technologies are quickly becoming the ƒcornerstone of many organizations’ digital transformations, driving innovations across a variety of industries, including robotics, agriculture, personalized health care, emergency response, traffic flow management, electric power generation and delivery, as well as many smart, connected products and services just now being envisioned.

UH Manoa offers an educational track to help prepare students for employment in this exciting field and provides unique opportunities for students to work with faculty on advanced systems in this area.

Cyber Security

Cyber security has become a critical issue for our constantly connected societies, with reliable and better network connections and more personal and industrial applications. Cyber defense and offense have never-ended cycles. For engineering students, they need to learn basic security principles and understand fundamental security threats such that they can consider secure designs and implementations when building their practical systems.

We provide a set of introduction classes at both ECE and ICS to cover key issues in cyber security, including security principles, basic cryptography and tools, computer system security, network security, wireless security, privacy and data analytic security, web security, database security, malware, and application security. These topics cover the most common security problems on existing systems. We also offer project-based design projects on current security research problems, such as drone security, cloud security, IoT security, mobile wireless security, etc. These courses and projects provide abundant opportunities for our students to grasp the fundamentals and develop their own interests in cyber security.

Data Science and Machine Learning

Data science is an inter-disciplinary field that uses scientific methods, processes, algorithms and systems to extract, manipulate, and analyze information from big data, (un)structured data, mixed data, etc. It uses data collection, processing, modeling, storing, and analysis, probability and statistics, machine learning and artificial intelligence, optimization algorithms, domain knowledge and their related methods. Data scientists in companies and organizations transform collected-data into usable-data to determine optimal operations.

Software Engineering

Computing systems has been and will continue to impact all facets of our daily life. Every day examples include smart phones, social networking, online shopping, entertainment, intelligent appliances, auto electronics, and cloud services. Software engineers or software developers design, develop, maintain, test, and evaluate computer programs.

Software engineering discipline covers mathematical theory and software development methodologies. Theory is needed to ensure that software will run correctly and efficiently. Software development methodologies are needed because often software can be complicated and large, e.g., tens of million lines of code. Within the computer engineering program, software engineers must be able to write code that can effectively interact with hardware.