The Auburn University Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering has been heavily involved in research for approximately five decades. This research has supported numerous government agencies: for example, entities within the U. S. Department of Defense, such as the Army, Navy, Air Force and DARPA have been supported as well as NIH, NSF, DOE, USDA and Sandia National Laboratories. The faculty of the department has also provided research support to a host of industries, such as Diamler/Chrysler, IBM, Motorola, Northrup/Grumman, Semiconductor Research Corporation, Southern Company, Texas Instruments and the Whirlpool Corporation. Some of the department's laboratories have also provided needed and up-to-date technology to numerous companies within the state of Alabama, some of which were in their startup mode.
The department is also home to three of the College of Engineering's research centers: the Alabama Micro/Nano Science and Technology Center (AMNSTC), the Center for Advanced Vehicle Electronics (CAVE) and the Wireless Engineering Research and Education Center (WEREC). The faculty continually track the new and advancing technology and adjust their programs to meet these ever-changing needs. At present, the research focus areas being addressed by the faculty are communication networks, electric power engineering, electronic packaging, embedded systems, high-performance computing, information security, microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), mine detection, nanotechnology, signal processing, silicon-germanium electronics, smart antennas, telecommunications, transceiver design and very large scale integration (VLSI) design and test.
