Electronic Design Software

Is creating/designing electronics/tech stuff considered electronic or computer engineering?

I'm a high school junior interested in a career designing/creating electronics as a career when I'm out school; cell phones, TV's, video games - pretty much anything tech. I was just wondering if this would be considered electronic or computer engineering; I've gotten many mixed answers in the past; with the argument being electronic engineering would focus more on electrical engineering, and that computer engineering would focus more on software/programming. Right now I'm just looking for any more serious (profession is also a big bonus) opinions that may help define what I'm looking for in a major. I was also wondering what some good colleges are for said major. I know some like MIT, UC Berkeley, and Stanford are about top 3 or so, but I'm also looking for some good colleges less-known schools as well. P.S> By video games, I didn't mean the games themselves, but rather the video game systems.

Public Comments

1. Electrical Engineering (widely referred to as "double-E" or EE) and Computer Engineering are largely the same. Some schools don't even offer Computer Engineering - only EE. Your last couple years in college you can decide how to specialize the degree by taking more computer architecture and chip design courses or analog electronics or whatever. With a EE or Computer Engineering degree, depending on how you specialize, you could work in board design, chip (ASIC) design, CPU architecture, GPU architecture, analog circuit design (PLL, DLL, I/O pads, amplifiers, etc.), electrical power engineering, or several other fields. It seems like you would like one of these majors. Video games or computer programming of any kind is generally pursued with a Computer Science ("Comp Sci" or "CS") degree. In that course of study, you might take a few computer architecture courses to understand how computers work, but you will generally not be qualified to design computer hardware or electronics. You would take extensive courses on data structures, algorithms, programming languages, compiler design, etc. Your life would be programming. Personally, I find computer programming to be more accessible to personal study, and so I majored in Computer and Systems Engineering (RPI '98). I figured I could pick up computer science on my own with books or the internet to guide me. I thought picking up the hardware / chip design knowledge would be more difficult on my own. Some good engineering schools to consider that you didn't mention would be RPI, Cornell, WPI, Carnegie Mellon, and plenty of others.
2. if you want to design the things you list then Electrical Engineering is the choice for you. Depending on where you look there's lot of related degrees out there - electrical, electronic, computer, and computer science engineering are all fairly closely related. Electrical Engineering - designing electronic systems - hardware and software Electronic Engineering - designing electronic components - transistors, logic chips, processors etc - these are the things electrical engineers use to design their systems Computer Engineering - specialization of electronics engineering concerned only with computer hardware components - CPU, GPU, PPU, memory, hard drives, etc - note if you design an entire computer you're probably an electrical engineer Computer Science Engineering - basically a software engineer - designs and (most of the time) writes computer software code you could search the internet for good engineering schools and get a thousand different opinions - I went the Tulane University - they have a great engineering school BSEE 1990
3. With a BS degree in Electrical Engineering you can later specialize in many areas. I specialized in electronics, IC integrated circuit designs consisting of transistors, resistor placed on silicon wafers. I also designed floppy and hard drive PLL chips for computers. Later on I got into power supplies, copiers and printers designs. Computer engineering I believe would be selecting components for computers i.e microprocessors, mother boards, math processors, voice recognition chips etc. Within the electrical engineering career you will need to decide if you want to be analog or digital, design computers by specifying and selecting components or actually designing the components. A degree in computer science would be more focused on software/programming. I went to San Jose State University. I thought I was well prepared for my career.