What is computer engineering?
Of the 14 branches of engineering tracked by the United States Department of Labor, computer engineering has grown the fastest over the past two decades. Once confined to university laboratories and big companies, computers have permeated our everyday lives over the last two decades. Computer engineers create objects and services that today’s consumers often take for granted. Specifically, they design, construct, and test the computer systems that keep us going. It’s not unusual to find a computer engineer involved in everything from cars to toasters. Computer engineering was originally a branch of the larger specialty of electrical engineering, since early computers required engineers to physically install tubes and solder connections. In the past few decades, however, as electrical engineers focused on the skills of building actual computing devices, computer engineering emerged as a unique specialty. Computer engineers now focus more of their skills on designing useful software appl
Computer Engineering is the design and prototyping of computing devices and systems. While sharing much history and many areas of interest with Computer Science, Computer Engineering concentrates its effort on the ways in which computing ideas are mapped into working physical systems. Emerging equally from the disciplines of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering rests on the intellectual foundations of these disciplines, the basic physical sciences and mathematics.
Since engineering is the application of the principles of basic science to the solving of problems within constraints (that is, building things!), computer engineering is engineering applied to computers and computer-based systems. In other words, computer engineers build computers such as PCs, workstations, and supercomputers. They also build computer-based systems such as those found in cars, planes, appliances, electronics, phones, communication networks, and many, many other products. Computer engineers typically design not only the hardware, but also much of the software in computer-based systems.
