Signals, systems and communication theory
Sampling, transforms, modulation and channel behaviour. The reason I think about a data path as something with bandwidth and noise rather than as a function call.
Track record
2018–2022 · Undergraduate degree
B.E. Electronics & Communication Engineering
Four years at Kings College of Engineering, an autonomous institution affiliated to Anna University. The degree is where the hardware half of my instincts came from - the part that still decides how I reason about latency, memory and failure.
- Degree
- B.E.
- Branch
- Electronics & Communication
- Batch
- 2018 - 2022
- CGPA
- 8.26 / 10
- University
- Anna University, Chennai
01The institution
Kings College of Engineering was established in 2001 by the Raj Educational Trust and sits at Punalkulam, in Gandarvakottai Taluk of Pudukkottai district - about half an hour from Thanjavur, which is where I am from. It is a self-financing engineering college running seven undergraduate programmes and five postgraduate ones.
- Established
- 2001
- Founded by
- Raj Educational Trust
- Status
- Autonomous
- Approval
- AICTE, New Delhi
- Location
- Punalkulam, Pudukkottai
- Autonomous status. Conferred by the UGC, New Delhi and by Anna University, Chennai, so the college sets and examines its own curriculum within the university framework.
- NAAC accredited, and recognised under Sections 2(f) and 12B of the UGC Act.
- Approved by AICTE, New Delhi.
- Rated 'AAA' by Career360.
- Affiliated to Anna University, Chennai - the degree itself is an Anna University degree.
Institution facts on this page are taken from the college's own site, kingsengg.edu.in. The batch, branch and CGPA are mine.
02The department
Electronics & Communication is one of seven B.E. and B.Tech branches the college runs, alongside Civil, Computer Science, Electrical & Electronics, Mechanical, Artificial Intelligence & Data Science, and Information Technology. ECE is the branch that sits closest to the hardware-software boundary, which is the part I ended up staying with.
Digital electronics and microprocessors
Logic design, memory organisation and processor architecture from the register level up - the same ground the later STM32 work is built on.
Networks and transmission
Where the TCP/IP work started: layered protocols, framing and the cost of getting a message from one machine to another intact.
Embedded and VLSI foundations
Microcontroller programming and hardware description, which is what made a bare-metal game engine on a Cortex-M4 feel like a reasonable thing to attempt.
03My batch
- Enrolled
- July 2018
- Graduated
- March 2022
- Duration
- 4 years, full time
- Result
- CGPA 8.26
The statement below shows what the pandemic did to the schedule. Several first- and
second-semester papers carry passing dates of Nov 2020 and
Apr 2021 rather than 2018, because the university's examination calendar
slipped and papers were re-sat well after the semester they belonged to. The degree still
took its four years. The order of them was not the normal one.
04The record
Anna University issues one consolidated statement of grades covering all eight semesters. Mine came out at a CGPA of 8.26 across the degree, classified First Class, with the last examinations sat in April 2022.
- CGPA
- 8.26 / 10
- Classification
- First Class
- Regulations
- 2017 (CBCS)
- Last appearance
- April 2022
- Statement issued
- 27 Sep 2022
The full statement runs to about sixty courses. These are the ones that actually feed the work on this site - data structures, microcontrollers, embedded and real-time systems, computer architecture and networks.
| Code | Course | Credits | Grade | GP |
|---|---|---|---|---|
EC8393 | Fundamentals of Data Structures in C | 3 | A | 8 |
EC8381 | Fundamentals of Data Structures in C Laboratory | 2 | A+ | 9 |
EC8691 | Microprocessors and Microcontrollers | 3 | O | 10 |
EC8681 | Microprocessors and Microcontrollers Laboratory | 2 | O | 10 |
EC8791 | Embedded and Real Time Systems | 3 | A+ | 9 |
EC8711 | Embedded Laboratory | 2 | O | 10 |
EC8552 | Computer Architecture and Organization | 3 | A+ | 9 |
EC8551 | Communication Networks | 3 | O | 10 |
EC8563 | Communication Networks Laboratory | 2 | O | 10 |
EC8392 | Digital Electronics | 3 | A | 8 |
EC8095 | VLSI Design | 3 | A+ | 9 |
EC8661 | VLSI Design Laboratory | 2 | O | 10 |
EC8811 | Project Work | 10 | O | 10 |
Grading scale under regulations R-2017: O = 10, A+ = 9, A = 8, B+ = 7, B = 6, U = fail.
05What carried forward
The degree did not make me a systems programmer. That came later, and mostly from writing code that had to survive a machine. But it decided the direction. Four years of being told what the hardware is actually doing underneath is why I reach for a measurement before a rewrite, and why allocation behaviour is the first place I look when a latency tail shows up.