The Department offers a B. Tech. program in Electronics and Communication Engineering, Electronics and Computer Engineering and a M. Tech. degree in VLSI Design. The faculty team consists of experts from the industry and academia.
The department is highly praised for its activities in the technical front, contributing highly towards the development of cutting-edge technologies and professionals. While building a solid foundation of the fundamentals, the students are also exposed to emerging trends in the industry and are molded to be quality professionals of the future.
Electronics and Communication Engineering laboratories are equipped with state-of-the-art equipment and advanced software that enables the design of Very Large Scale Integrated (VLSI) circuits.
Several faculty members have received their graduate and post-graduate degrees from institutions of international repute and has rich industrial experience, especially in companies involved in cutting edge technologies in the US.
Our students actively participate in organizing various events such as technical workshops through the IEEE student chapter. Several faculty members and students are actively engaged in research and regularly publish their work in international journals and conferences.The department research activities provide the students with invaluable knowledge from an industry perspective and equips them to enter any ECE related industry with confidence.
To provide a value-based learning environment for producing engineers with a blend of technical skills, moral values and leadership qualities in the field of Electronics, Communication and Computing channelized towards technological advancement to cater to the needs of the industry and the society.
The Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering offers the following programs:
The faculty team consists of experts from the industry and academia. The department is highly praised for its activities in the technical front, contributing highly towards the development of cutting edge technologies and professionals. While building a solid foundation of the fundamentals, the students are also exposed to emerging trends in the industry and are molded to be quality professionals of the future.
Classes are also delivered by experts from various partner universities around the world through the e-learning network as well as in the form of workshops and seminars.
The courses are practice oriented and encourage the students to undertake real-time projects and actively participate in worldwide technical conferences and workshops and present their work in many of them.
A large number of resident faculty members in the campus and a good student-teacher relationship empower the students to have frequent discussions and brainstorming sessions on innovative ideas for projects and research work.
The curriculum is organized such that it enables students to get a strong foundation on various aspects of Electronics and Communication Engineering such as Digital Systems Design, Electromagnetic Theory, Digital Signal Processing, Microprocessors and Microcontrollers, Electronic Circuits, VLSI Design, Digital Communication, Analog Communication, Control Engineering, and Microwave Engineering.
The graduate and undergraduate curriculum offers a wide variety of electives focusing on various aspects of VLSI design for students to choose from. Some of the electives include Integrated Circuit Fabrication Technology, CMOS IC Design, Advanced Digital Design and HDLs, USB System Architecture and Design and Superscalar Processor Architecture.
The students are also provided an opportunity to choose specialization electives to focus on their identified areas of interest such as Embedded Systems, Wireless Communication, Satellite Communication, Biomedical Signal Processing, VLSI fabrication technology, Speech Processing, Optical Communication. The curriculum and syllabus are on par with IITs and leading international universities and are frequently updated to reflect the latest trends in the field.
The Department consists of eminent faculty with a healthy mixture of Industrial Experience, Academics, and Research. Several faculty members have received their graduate and post-graduate degrees from institutions of international repute such as University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), University of Texas at Austin, University of California, Irvine, Indian Institute of Technology, Indian Institute of Science etc., and/or have been working on research and development projects in firms across the globe. Several faculty members have been exposed to cutting edge research both in India and abroad. In addition, some of the faculty have several years of industrial experience in reputed companies in the US such as Broadcom Corp, Synopsis Inc., Cirrus Logic etc.
The department upholds its research work by maintaining National and International research networks. The department itself has more than 5 funded projects. Various research and projects carried out in the Department in core areas give the students an opportunity to explore engineering on a large scale. The Research area extends over diverse disciplines such as VLSI (Very Large Scale Integration) Design, Digital and Analog Electronics, Data Communication, Wireless Communication, Signal Processing and Image Processing.
The students and researchers working on various research areas are privileged to receive the mentorship of Dr. Jayachandran Nair, Distinguished Professor who has hands-on experience in various fields such as Computational Seismology, Communication, Biomedical Engineering, Wireless Sensor Networks and Signal Processing. The research areas of PhD scholars focus on areas such as Biomedical Signal Processing , Speech Signal Processing and Brain Computer Interface.
Research in Biomedical Signal Processing involves EEG (Electroencephalograph) signal analysis of patients using modern Signal Processing methods. The work currently in progress is Epileptic EEG analysis for Classification, Modelling and Estimation of Brain states in Ictal, Pre-ictal and Inter-ictal periods.
The research work on Speech Signal Processing is focussed on Speech Recognition, Feature Extraction & Classification of languages particularly- Malayalam phonemes and recognition of Malayalam speech. Even though the primary focus is on Malayalam, the work is intended to be extended to other languages also in future.
The research work on Brain Computer Interface focuses on the study of EEG signals, use of modern Signal Processing techniques and Machine Learning Algorithms for Pre-Processing, Removal of Artifacts, Segmentation, Classification and Characterization. The research will also be dealing with classification of signals generated due to normal, event evoked and pathological conditions. The functional aspects of these classified signals are then studied using various Signal Processing Algorithms and Machine Learning Techniques. The effects of external stimulus on EEG will also be studied under supervised and unsupervised condition.
The research ongoing in this area includes Information and Coding Theory, Nonlinear Dynamics/Chaos Theory and its Applications to Communications, Wavelets, Compressed Sensing, Time Series Analysis and Classification. Dr. Nithin Nagraj, has been carrying out extensive work in this area and holds two patents – one for Graph extraction labelling and visualization and the other for Method and apparatus for segmenting structure in CT angiography.
Currently he is working on "Mathematical modelling of population dynamics of Drosophila Melanogaster", a research project funded by the Department of Bio-technology, Govt. of India., in collaboration with IISER (Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research) Pune.
Other research areas in Data Communication include Automatic Classification of Periodic, Chaotic and Random Time Series Data using Lossless Compression Algorithms, and Chaotic Computing and Logic Design using Nonlinear Maps.
The Department currently executes wide range of research projects under the guidance of Dr. Bibhu Dutta Sahoo, Associate Professor in the dept. of ECE. The research topic "Development of Algorithms and Circuits for High-Speed Serial Links" aims at developing algorithms and circuits to enable 28 Gbps or 40 Gbps serial links. The circuits will be developed using 65-nm CMOS process. Fabrication will be done at UMC followed by testing to show a prototype as a proof-of-concept.
"Development of a non-linearity calibration technique for a VCO-based ADC" involves development of a non-linear calibration technique to realize both higher-order noise shaping as well as high-resolution. This technique will also be demonstrated by fabricating a chip in 65-nm process.
Yet another research topic, "Development of highly linear DACs using Digital Predistortion Techniques" aims at developing a 14-bit 1Gbps linear DAC. Digital Predistortion will be done to realize high linearity. The chip will be fabricated in 65-nm process.
The department also focuses on research areas in VLSI Logic Design and VLSI Signal Processing particularly high speed algorithm for Signal Processing.
Most of the research work in this area in spearheaded by Mr. Rajesh Kannan, an Asst. Professor of the Department of ECE. The ongoing research in this area includes Embedded Control and Navigation, Robotics, Health Care, Real Time Systems, Wireless and Embedded Network Sensing Systems which includes various interdisciplinary areas associated with embedded systems.
A dedicated research lab is fully functioning in the department named HuT - ( Humanitarian Technology lab) mainly focusing on Health Care, Robotics, Human Aided Devices, and Embedded Sensor Networks. The focus areas of health care include Remote Patient Monitoring System and Pre-Patal Monitoring (also named PULSS) integrated with Wireless Transmission. Both these projects are funded by IEEE Standards Education Committee, NJ, USA.
An 'Elder-health-care' project named HOPE (Wireless gadget for Home Bound Elders) mainly concentrates on providing assistance to bed-ridden patients. Without annoying the patient, a wireless Gadget is provided to them which simultaneously collect different body parameters like Pulse rate, Oxygen content in the blood, Temperature, Blood pressure and ECG measurement. The gadget also measures 'tilt' (whether the patient is out of his correct position) using Accelerometer. The gadget incorporates a bluetooth enabled module and the data is wirelessly transmitted to a smart phone core having an Android Operating system. The data acquired is transmitted to a remote patient management server where a specialist diagnoses the status of the patient.
Another project is Pre-natal monitoring – an "Assistive Technology for Pregnant Women Health Care: Rural, Mobile Ultrasound Scan System". This system diagnoses the pregnant woman's health status in their home itself by clinicians and community health workers so that the people need not to travel. The device will be conducting Ultra Sound Scanning, collect the health parameters such as Pulse rate, Oxygen content in the blood, Temperature, Blood pressure etc. The gathered information is stored on a portable device and the workers deliver this to the nearby hospital where the specialist doctors can assess the present physical condition of the patient.
The Robotics projects conducted by the department include "Intelligent Home Navigation System (IHNS) for the elderly and the physically challenged" and "Robo-Coconut Climber". Both these projects are again funded by IEEE Foundation Inc., NJ, USA. In IHNS, the wheel Chair mobility will be controlled by the gestures of a person’s palm and finger movement. A sensor unit is fixed on the hand rest of chair. The system uses image processing technology to detect the hand movements and controls the wheel chair accordingly.
Robotic Coconut Tree Climber - In Kerala coconuts are grown in large scale and collecting the coconuts is becoming an increasingly tedious task and the labour cost is high, also the coconut tree climbers are very rare these days. In this scenario, the need is a robot which will do the job. The robot climbs the tree and plucks the coconuts; the robot is under the control of a person who in a convenient place from where he can control the robot action. The system consists of Robotic Arm, Ground station, the Robo climber and a wireless camera unit, the Kinect and the Zigbee wireless Kinect controller. The ground station captures the user's gesture via kinect and controls the Robotic arm to cut the coconuts using Zigbee wireless interface.
The dedicated Research lab, HuT Labs - ( Humanitarian and Technology Labs) mainly focusing on Health Care, Robotics, Human Aided Devices, and Embedded Sensor Networks is headed by Prof. Rajesh Kannan Megalingam, of the department, was established in 2012. Within a year of establishment, HuT Labs carried out significant research works with more than 10 research paper publications and quite national and international recognitions. Hut Labs also acknowledges the contribution of IEEE Foundation and IEEE SEC both in NJ, USA for their support to our research work... Read More
Rajeswari P, Devi S, Shekar G, Purushothaman A, “Geometric Programming based Power optimization and Design Automation for a Digitally Controlled Pulse Width Modulator”, Circuits, systems and Signal processing, Springer.
Purushothaman A, Chetan D. Parikh,” A Low Power Low Area Capacitor Array based Digital to Analog Converter Architecture”, Microelectronics Journal, Elsevier, Volume 46, Issue 10, Page No 928–934, October 2015
Purushothaman A, Chetan D. Parikh, “A New Delay Model and Geometric Programming based Design Automation for Latched Comparator”, Circuits, systems and Signal processing, Springer, Volume 34, Issue 9, Page No. 2749-276, September 2015.
Karthi Balasubramanian, Silpa S Nair, Nithin Nagaraj “Classification of periodic, chaotic and random sequences using approximate entropy and Lempel-Ziv complexity measures”, Pramana - Journal of Physics, Indian Academy of Sciences, Vol. 84, Issue 3, Page No.365–372, Feb. 2015.
Wei, P.Zhang, Bibhudatta Sahoo and B. Razavi, “An 8-Bit 4-GS/s 120-mW CMOS ADC” IEEE Journal of Solid State Circuits , Issue No. 99, Page No. 1-11, Impact Factor : 3.063 August 2014.
Sivaramakrishnan Ramesh, Shibesh Dutta, Balakrishnan Shankar & Sundar Gopalan, “Identification of current transport mechanism in Al2O3 thin films for memory applications”, Applied Nanoscience (2014), Page No.1-9, 1st March 2014.
V.Sarma and Bibhudatta Sahoo, “Error feedback based noise shaping in a double sampled ADC” Springer Analog Integrated Circuits and Signal Processing, Volume No. 78, Issue No. 2 Page No. 421-430, Feb 2014.
Nithin Nagaraj, Karthi Balasubramanian, Sutirth Dey, “A new complexity measure for time series analysis and classification”, European Physics Journal – Special Topics, 222, Page No.847-860, 2013.
Several faculty of the department have gained significant international experience and hence the students are exposed to state of the art research and product development. The students can utilize this opportunity to broaden their knowledge and also to gain an insight into the future scope and possible areas of research and for pursuing higher study abroad. For strengthening research in diverse Engineering areas, the department has extended partnerships and collaboration with foreign Universities. This has facilitated the offering of dual degrees and many of the students have sought study opportunities abroad with scholarships over the past years. Many of the students have got admission at prestigious Universities in United States and U K and have enrolled in doctorate and M S programs.
Students Pursuing Higher Studies Abroad
Student Exchange Program upon Bilateral Agreement
Two B. Tech. students Ms. Panchami Krishnan (2013) and Mr. Akhil K. S. (2012 ) were selected for doing final semester of B. Tech. in KTH (Kungliga Tekniska högskolan), Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden, as a part of Student Exchange Program. Students selected for this programme must satisfy the requirement of completing the B. Tech. final project there along with course work.
Amrita UT-Austin Project Co-operation
As part of the Indo-US collaborative effort to improve quality education, the Department participates in combined undergraduate projects with various leading universities in the United States of America. Selected students at the department get a chance to work with student teams at the partner universities in research and development projects.
Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham infrastructure provides technological support to the students enabling them to use video conferencing and other online white board resources to have a seamless interaction with the team across the globe. This also provides exposure to the students to the current day global R&D platforms.
The latest project of this genre was collaboration with the Electrical Sciences Department at the University of Texas, Austin where four students from the 2005-09 ECE undergraduate batch developed a "USB based Bio-Medical Kit for the OLPC XO platform" that would be an excellent learning tool for the OLPC target community. A paper based on this work was published in an International Journal of Telemedicine and e-health in 2011. The students completed this work under the guidance of Dr. Sundar Gopalan. The students involved in this project are Mr. Nevin Alex Jacob, Mr. Vysakh P., Mr. Sandeep Nair and Mr. Prithviraj.
Eureca
Three students of the 2008-09 batch were selected for the EURECA project. These students were getting scholarship of 1000 euros per month for 6 months. All other expenses such as travel, food and accommodation were also met as a part of this project. They spent 6 months at the university completing their final project with fully-funded scholarship
Mr. Ashwin Menon S. was chosen to join the Antennas and Propagating Systems Division of The Royal Technological University (KTH) of Sweden.
Mr. Saneep Kottath and Mr. Navneet Menon were selected to join the Robotics Department of Malardalen University, Sweden.
Since 2009 Amrita has entered into a tie up with IIT-B. Students from Amrita were selected for doing projects in IIT-B as part of INUP, under CEN (Centre of Excellence in Nanoelectronics), a collaborative project between IIT Bombay and IISc Bangalore. The students were completely sponsored for the project including travel, accommodation and research facilitie
The Department has taken initiative for conducting interdisciplinary workshops, seminars, training programs etc. for members of the faculty and students. The department strengthens its academic excellence by establishing collaborative relations with national, international and private research institutions.
In order to enhance the technical expertise of students and facilitate further technical growth, an IEEE Student Branch (SB) was formed and has been actively functioning in the Institute since 2008. The student branch conducts various workshops and seminars. Its aim is to develop an acquaintance with recent technology and current industry trends and to develop professional skills.
Since 2012, IEEE student branch has been conducting Symposium on Education, Technology and Entrepreneurship (ISEE). It aims at bringing various academic disciplines under a single forum. It consists of various science and technology based lectures and workshops. Workshops at ISEE aims to educate students with knowledge other than subjects in their curriculum through these workshops.
In 2015 ISEE conducted a wide variety of workshops such as:
ISEE 2014 workshops include:
In 2013 also, ISEE conducted various workshops and/or seminars by prominent personalities all over the world on Industrial Electronics, Robotics, Networking, Signal processing, Cloud Computing and Entrepreneurships. »»
IEEE Student Branch, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham conducted 6 workshops during 2008 - 2011.
IEEE has approved the formation of five student chapters under Amrita IEEE SB (Student Branch).
With this the number of society chapters under the SB has gone upto five. This Institution is the only Student Branch in Kerala with five student society chapters.
The Department actively promotes research andprovides the faculty and students with opportunities to delve into high-quality research projects, and sponsorships projects, leading to research publications, articles and book chapters.
Award of Excellence- Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham
Reviewer/Editor for Reputed Journals and Conferences
Other Category
Best Paper Awards
AMS Best M. Tech Project Award
Richard E Marvin Scholarship
Mars Rover Challenge
Technical Competitions
National Level
One Moment of Robot Glory (OMRG) Asia 2016, Robotics Contest, Singapore.
Mentor Graphics University Design Contest
Texas Instrument Innovation Challenge 2015 (Semi Finals)
IEEE Student Enterprise Award
2012 – 2013 RecipientsMars Habitat Design Contest
TIDE Awards
The Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering has set up a few labs in order to carry out research in the identified thrust areas. These labs have facilities to conduct research at all levels. Students from Undergraduate and Postgraduate programs are actively involved in this lab to do research. Also research scholars and faculty members guide these students to do research in these labs. A diverse and talented pool of faculty with enviable credentials and sound knowledge in the academic discipline mentor the students in their projects and help them to realize their innovative ideas.
The Department has a very strong team focusing on research based VLSI Design.The VLSI design lab is equipped with state of the art computing platforms and hardware and software tools for ASIC and FPGA development.
The VLSI design lab is equipped with a torrent of development platforms and EDA tools including latest releases of Cadence, Synopsys ASIC design Tools, Mentor Graphics toolset for HDL design and FPGA prototyping, XILINX FPGA kits and the XILINX ISE and EDK platform tools, DSP kits from Texas Instruments etc.
The lab timings are highly flexible for the students to spend ample time validating their ideas. The entire system is designed to seamlessly identify capable students right during their undergraduate days, and train them in emerging technologies. Opportunity is also provided for bright students to work in various real-time research and development projects.
Some of the recent designs to site that rolled out from the undergraduate VLSI design team include a fully configurable FFT processor, FPGA based Digital Mammogram analyzer, a Superscalar implementation of the MIPS processor etc.
The lab has state of the art facilities for conducting experiments on basic digital systems based on LSI chips as well as advanced topics such as microcontroller interfacing and embedded computing using 8 to 32 bit microcontrollers. Along with the regular academic curriculum based experiments, the lab facilitates a platform for the undergraduate students to develop and validate newer concept based designs.
A low power implementation of wireless remote controlled display system, that was selected for presentation at the CMENS 2009 (Dec.) conference at Dubai is one of the project designed at the Digital systems Lab. A detailed list of publications is available at the research page.
The Analog electronics lab provides the undergraduate students an exposure to the basics of solid state electronics during the regular academic cycle and doubles up as a stage for the prototyping and validation of various undergraduate designs pertaining to low and medium power analog systems.
A host of communication systems based experiments are also built at the analog electronics lab including various hardware based analog and digital modulation techniques like basic AM, BSBSC-AM, FM, TDM etc for the undergraduate students to gain exposure.
The Microwave and Optical Communication lab is setup to introduce advanced concepts of transmission lines, radiating systems and high speed communication links to the students. The lab provides the students to try out various experiments on radiating systems and analyze the complex concepts introduced in the class.
The DSP, Communication and Simulation lab is a state of the art facility that provides the undergraduate and graduate students with high end computation and simulation systems for various high-end EDA and simulation tools including PSPICE, MATLAB, ModelSim, RouterSim etc. The lab also has provision for hardware in loop co-simulation and platform emulation using XILINX SPARTAN family FPGAs and Texas Instruments DSP system development kits. The DSP systems are introduced in a practical perspective where the design and development skills of the students are honed and refined to enable them to become future architects of advanced systems.