The Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering is the largest department in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. Students can receive degrees in electrical or computer engineering at the undergraduate, masters, and Ph.D. level.
Our total undergraduate enrollment is about 330 students. Regular tenured or tenure-track faculty teach the vast majority of core undergraduate courses, including freshman seminars, survey courses, senior design projects, circuits, electronics, and electromagnetics. In recent years, USC undergraduates in engineering as a group are among the brightest in the university, as measured by their incoming GPA and SAT scores, placing them in the same category as incoming undergraduates at the top five engineering schools in the U.S. News and World Report rankings.
We have a large graduate program, with approximately 1,000 M.S. students and 350 Ph.D. students. The Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering has a total of more than 60 tenured and tenure-track faculty, and it also employs several part-time lecturers to staff our course offerings, primarily in specialty fields.
Administratively, the department covers several major teaching and research groups: signal and image processing, communications, computer engineering, controls, and electrophysics. Research in signal and image processing includes speech, audio, biological genomics/proteomics signal processing; compression, multimedia, human-computer interfaces; biomedical imaging; neural and fuzzy theory. Research in communication theory and coding includes: optical, wireless, ultra-wideband (UWB) and spread spectrum communications; and quantum information processing (QIP). Computer engineering research topics include: VLSI design and CAD, testing, digital transceivers, asynchronous logic, computer networks, wireless and sensor networks, computer architecture, reconfigurable computing, and systems. Other areas include control systems and transportation, photonics, electromagnetics, energy conversion, mixed-signal integrated circuits, micro electro-mechanical systems and nanotechnology.