Computer Engineering at UT Dallas

A student lacking undergraduate prerequisites for graduate courses in electrical engineering and computer science must complete these prerequisites or receive approval from the graduate adviser and the course instructor. A diagnostic exam may be required. Specific admission requirements follow.

an undergraduate preparation equivalent to a baccalaureate in computer science or electrical engineering from an accredited engineering program,
a grade point average in upper-division quantitative course work of 3.0 or better on a 4-point scale, and
GRE examination scores of 500, 700 and 600 for the verbal, quantitative and analytical components respectively, or 1800 for the total score is advisable based on our experience with student success in the program. Applicants must submit three letters of recommendation from individuals able to judge the candidate's probability of success in pursuing master's study.

Applicants must also submit an essay outlining the candidate's background, education and professional goals.

Students from other engineering disciplines or from other science and math areas may be considered for admission to the program on a case-by-case basis; however, some additional course work may be necessary before starting the master's program.

All students must have an academic adviser and an approved degree plan. Courses taken without adviser approval will not count toward the 33 semester-hour requirement. Successful completion of the approved course of studies leads to the M.S.C.E. degree.

The M.S.C.E. program has both a thesis and a non-thesis option. All part-time M.S.C.E. students will be assigned initially to the non-thesis option. Those wishing to elect the thesis option may do so by obtaining the approval of a faculty thesis supervisor.

All full-time, supported students are required to participate in the thesis option. The thesis option requires six semester hours of research, a written thesis submitted to the graduate school, and a formal public defense of the thesis. The supervising committee administers this defense and is chosen in consultation with the student's thesis adviser prior to enrolling for thesis credit.

Each student must take 4 required courses: Microprocessor Systems (CE 6302), Computer Architecture (CE 6304), VLSI Design (CE 6325) and Advanced Operating Systems (CE 6378). Required courses must be passed with a grade of B or better.

Approved electives must be taken to make a total of 33 hours. These courses must be at 6000 level or higher from computer engineering, electrical engineering, computer science and telecommunications engineering curricula with the approval of the advisor. It is highly recommended that two of these electives be chosen from the following list:

The Jonsson School has broad capabilities in Information Technology Infrastructure, focusing on telecommunications, computing, optical and photonic devices, signal processing and circuits and devices. Additional detail of some of the specific areas is included below.

Communication and Signal Processing: Current research in this area is focused on the design and analysis of systems where the objective is to communicate between network users, signal transmission, signal extraction and information processing. These techniques are currently being applied to communication systems, biological and medical image processing, radar, sonar, optical and seismic image processing.

Digital Systems, Circuits and Systems: Our work in this area is varied including, computer architecture, computer arithmetic, numerical algorithm development, VLSI design, energy–efficient digital systems, high level synthesis, reconfigurable systems, and special purpose architectures, in addition to high performance digital systems, analog integrated circuits, CAD algorithms and physical design. Our product line includes both design and physical hardware implementation for testing and performance assessment.

Optical and Photonic devices, Materials and Systems: The faculty are involved in optical switching, and multiplexing, wavelength conversion, optical amplifiers, wavelength division multiplexing, linear and non-linear propagation in fibers, solitons, inverse scattering, diffractive optical elements, optical characterization of semiconductor and optical materials, and ultrafast lasers and semiconductor lasers.

Solid-State Devices and Circuits: The research program in the solid state area is focused in the fabrication and characterization of novel semi-conductor devices and optical materials. The research is enhance by a 10,00 square foot lean room with substantial processing capability including sub 0.25 micro lithography. We have recently added Micro, Nano and Opto electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS, NEMS, OEMS) processing to our capability.