The Department's Computing Lab
In addition to 24/7 access to the computing facilities available to all students in the campus computer classrooms, electronics students have exclusive and open access to the department's computer laboratory from 08:00 to 20:00 Monday to Friday (and until 22:30 on 'film nights', usually two or three nights per week).
The laboratory is situated in a purpose-built facility offering video projection equipment for teaching purposes, and provides a set of PCs with permanent Internet access via the campus gigabit ethernet network. The PCs, running under Microsoft Windows XP, offer a wide range of general purpose software such as word processing, graphics and e-mail, plus specialist teaching software such as JAVA, C and VHDL compilers, MATLAB, PSpice and PIC and Xilinx FPGA development tools.
As a result of a generous donation from Texas Instruments, the laboratory also provides DSP-based teaching equipment.
Technical support is provided between 09:00 and 17:15 Monday to Friday by the Computer Support Group, located adjacent to the laboratory.
The Department encourages students to make full use of all the computing facilities available to them, not only as part of their timetabled courses but also as a way of developing their general IT skills.