Electrical Engineering is an indispensible High Tech enabling technology. This means that designing and realizing any high tech system requires some or extended electrical engineering. This can be in many fields, for example the system might require an electronic circuit or a control unit, a connection to a computer or a microprocessor. Electrical engineering extends to developing technologies to actually make chips, and to methods to analyze complex systems ranging from a super computer to a traffic system or even a model of the world.

The following examples show what our professors are doing at the department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Twente.

A good example typical for Electrical Engineering is Smart dust:

Smart dust are small systems capable of performing a function, for which the fact of having many systems operating simultaneously brings the whole to an interesting performance. Smart dust particles might be used to study e.g. a tornado. The particles record properties of their environment (e.g. temperature, pressure) and communicate these properties along with their position and speed to a central computer. This way a complete picture of a tornado can be obtained, enabling meteorologists to understand the formation and development of this phenomenon and thereby helping to refine models for weather forecast. Similar systems have applications also in climate, oceanography, geology. They are being used to study migration of fish and birds. They might be used in the future to control the state of buildings.

In the drawing we see some of the components required to realize a smart dust particle. It needs some electronics, means to store energy and data, a system to harvest energy from the surroundings, e.g. a solar cell, sensors to monitor the relevant properties of the surrounding, a communication system, a GPS etc.

The central computer which communicates with the smart dust particles has to cope with a massive stream of data, store data and interpret them, and serve for a suitable interface to the human user. In next generation it might be possible for two-way communication with the dust particles. The particles might be active such that they can move actively, decide on what to measure, react on the environment, communicate directly with each other, shut off if no longer needed or when energy is low. In other words, the next generations of smart dust will become intelligent dust.

Intelligent dust is a good example because many main branches of electrical engineering play a role: electronics, data storage, communication, energy storage, transfer and generation, sensors, control, signal conditioning, robotics and optics. We might have taken an example in from healthcare, where you had seen that the same branches pop up. Or an example related to modern traffic and transport, security, environment, astronomy or food.

In other words: Electrical engineering equips you with skills and knowledge which can be applied in virtually all technological fields.