The electronics engineer is an essential participant in any modern production systems and contributes to its safety, efficiency and competitiveness. The wealth of possibilities that are open to today’s electronic engineer are only to be limited by the imagination, this being an engineering branch that finds applications in virtually all current areas of human activity.

Our Department covers all of the main topics related to electronics engineering, with academic activities in the areas of teaching, research and industrial outreach.

The Department is firmly committed to research and has been successful in securing stable financial support for these activities from a variety of local and international funding agencies, as well as from the industrial sector. The main lines of research are:

- Control theory, industrial control and systems. Applications of power electronics, static converters, robotics, mineral grinding, etc.
- Data networks, wireless and optical communications, routing and system optimization.
- Electronics, signal processing and computer applications in medicine.
- Research on academic methodologies and development of textbooks.

Research in the Department is in many cases done in collaboration with the local as well as the international industrial sector. This has included relevant actors in the mining industry, telecommunications sector and computer networks, as well as a broad range of smaller companies requiring advanced technological support. A very significant proportion of the final research projects of the graduating engineers are based on real technical problems proposed by industry. This typically involves solving technical problems and dealing with the economic implications of applying new technologies and production techniques.

The Department has established a wide ranging collaboration network involving many prestigious institutions worldwide. A strong emphasis has been placed on the achievement of demonstrable results through this collaboration. This has involved mainly the co-authorship of journal and conference papers, co-guidance of graduate theses and the joint presentation of research proposals. Among the international partners are PUC of Río de Janeiro (Brazil), INRIA (France), the University of Newcastle (Australia), National University of Singapore (Singapore), Technical University of Varna (Bulgaria), Bell-Laboratories (Alcatel-Lucent-USA) and the University of Quebec (Canada).