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Electrical Engineering at the University of Edinburgh (1926-2002)

Electrical Engineering was first taught as a subject within Engineering at The University of Edinburgh from 1926, with many students receiving ordinary degree awards in Engineering. Electrical Engineering was organised as a separate discipline within Engineering with the appointment in 1948 of Ewart Farvis as a Lecturer in Applied Electricity. Farvis was later appointed to the Chair of Electrical Engineering, in 1961, establishing a separate Department of Electrical Engineering. From 1967 the Department of Electrical Engineering was coordinated, along with the separate Departments of Chemical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering, by the School of Engineering Science, forming a federation of these autonomous departments. In 1979 The Department of Civil Engineering joined a renamed School of Engineering and, in 1989, this converted into a School of Engineering and Informatics by adding the Department of Computer Science. Electrical Engineering was subsumed into the School of Engineering in 2002.

Teaching

Electrical Engineering was first taught as a subject or discipline within the Department of Engineering at The University of Edinburgh in 1926. Many students received ordinary degree awards in Engineering, with few Honours graduations in Electrical Engineering (up to 1940, figures never exceeded 5 students per annum). 1941 saw the introduction of a designated ordinary degree in Electrical Engineering, with up to 11 such graduations each year, while the honours Electrical Engineering class increased to up to 9 students per year in the period up to 1965. Notable graduates of this period include Duncan McCallum (who became General Manager of Ferranti, Edinburgh) and Sir Duncan McDonald (who became Chief Executive of Northern Engineering Industries, Newcastle.

In 1950, Ewart Farvis launched a 1-year postgraduate Diploma in Electronics and Radio; he also initiated research into the new field of solid state devices and what later became semiconductor materials. Many of Farvis’ post-war innovations in the undergraduate curriculum were tried out at Edinburgh before catching on elsewhere, including: open book examinations, individual experimental project work and in-depth dissertation writing. Farvis was innovative in moving the final honours’ examination diet from June to January, to improve the student focus on project work. Notable graduates of this period include Michael Ramsay (co-inventor of the TiVo digital recorder) and Don MacLennan (who became Technical Marketing Manager of General Electric semiconductors).

In the early 1980s the Science Research Council, the forerunner to the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, launched MSc Conversion Courses in Information Technology and Microelectronics. One of the early microelectronics students at The University of Edinburgh was Dave Renshaw, an Edinburgh school teacher who later became a lecturer and then a partner with Peter Denyer in VLSI Vision Systems.

Jeff Collins, the second Head of Department, realigned a number of the undergraduate courses to match developments in the microelectronics industry. Peter Dryburgh developed a course on silicon semiconductor technology, building on Alan Owen’s course on semiconductor theory and, in 1979, when the microprocessor appeared, this was immediately added to the curriculum in a new Laboratory organised by Bob Kelly. In 1981, with the advent of the logic gate array, Mervyn Jack enabled students to design and build complex silicon circuits using the processing facilities of the Edinburgh Microfabrication Facility. Later, in 1993, the Department was gifted 50 software licences for the Cadence advanced VLSI Design Tool Set to enable third year students to conduct more advanced circuit designs in the “Cadence Laboratory for Scotland”. The increase in undergraduate student numbers over this period was matched by additional academic staff, rising from 10 to 25 over the period 1977 to 1984. Research Grant awards increased significantly and research student numbers increased to around 30, assisting in the operation of the undergraduate laboratories. Over several years, the Electrical Engineering Department maintained what was then a unique undergraduate teaching structure for the Final Year of the 4-year BEng programmes in “Microelectronics” and "Electronics and Electrical Engineering” with final written papers assessed every January and the programme concluding with individual project and the group dissertation exercises. The first 5-year MEng graduation started in 1992 for a programme which incorporated a 9 month long project, mostly conducted in local industry. The rationale for the Edinburgh EE degree programmes was that “the first year matched school kids to the University environment; the second and third years were to inculcate in them the principles and modern practices of Electrical Engineering, and the final year matched students to the real world”.

Research

The second chair in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Edinburgh was formed when Jeff Collins returned from his position as Director of Physical Sciences at Rockwell International in 1970 to take up the SRC sponsored research chair. Collins initiated University research in analogue signal processing with surface acoustic wave (SAW) and magnetostatic wave devices and complementary industrial activity in SAW radar pulse compression filters, locally at Microwave and Electronic Systems Ltd (MESL) in Newbridge, near Edinburgh. In 1989 MESL secured a Queen's Award for Technological Achievement in Radar Signal Processing using SAW Pulse Compression before being later acquired by Racal and then ComDev.

Following study leave at the University of Texas at Arlington in 1976-77, Collins returned to The University of Edinburgh, taking over as Head of the Electrical Engineering Department, on Ewart Farvis' retiral. The SRC identified a need for dedicated University Centres to provide processing of silicon semiconductor devices for all the UK’s Universities, establishing two centres at Edinburgh and Southampton. Edinburgh received £316,000 of initial funding in 1978 with Jeff Collins, John Mavor and John Robertson as Principal Investigators. This enhanced an earlier facility started by Farvis in 1964. The Edinburgh Microfabrication Facility (EMF) received the largest ever University of Edinburgh research award of £2.5 million in 1982 with continual subsequent equipment upgrades over the years, securing a £1 million donation of an Eaton Corporation NV10-160 Ion Implanter in 1992.

John Mavor was promoted in 1980 to the Lothian Chair of Microelectronics and John Robertson took up the Director of the Edinburgh Microfabrication Facility position. In 1993 John Robertson left to form the Motorola University in Phoenix and Anthony Walton took over as EMF Director. By 2000 the EMF had outgrown its limited space so, with funding from Scottish Enterprise, a new facility, the Scottish Microelectronics Centre (SMC) was opened in 2002 with 300m² of class 10 and 250m² of class 1,000-10,000 cleanrooms and 1000m² of office and laboratory space.

John Mavor developed research in the design of Very Large Scale Integrated Circuits (VLSI) and he, Meryvn Jack and Peter Denyer secured a large SERC four-year Rolling Grant. Mavor concentrated on developing charge coupled devices (CCDs) for signal processing and CCDs were also used to realise early imager chips for digital cameras. Mavor organised for several years, with staff from Texas Instruments, the CCD conference series.  Research in microelectronic systems continued under Alan Murray, who specialised in the design of artificial neural networks. Alan Owen continued to receive substantial funding from SERC and industrial sources for his research on amorphous silicon devices. PhD’s from this period are Colin Carruthers, who leads Xilinx in the UK and Ken Sutherland, President of Toshiba Medical Visualization Systems Europe.

Peter Grant developed research on analogue signal processing device fabrication and also on digital signal processing software development. One major research contribution by Colin Cowan and Sheng Chen was on the application of the radial basis function network to achieve a high performance adaptive Bayesian filtering solutions. These structures provided performance improvements over linear adaptive filters, as recognized by the many paper citations and the 1992 IEE Marconi paper premium.  Notable PhD graduands from this era are Barry Darby and Malcolm Davey who completed their careers in senior positions with Racal Electronics and Vodafone respectively. A later graduand, Gordon Povey, founded Trisent. Other research on spread spectrum communication systems and Bernard Mulgrew’s activities in radar signal processing was as the forerunner to the establishment of the Research Institute for Digital Communications.

Electrical Engineering research in Electrical Power Systems was coordinated by Bert Whittington, concentrating on: Energy trading; the design of power systems for developing countries (e.g. micro hydro schemes for Papua New Guinea), enhancing power electronics (e.g. to improve the design of switched-mode power supplies , as they became increasingly used in domestic electronics products).

John Mavor became Head of Department in 1984 before he moved up to become Dean of the Faculty of Science and Engineering for five years. The Department continued to grow until 2002 when all the individual Engineering Departments were merged with the formation of the integrated School of Engineering under the leadership of Peter Grant. Electrical Engineering research continues in three Research Institutes: Micro and Nano Systems, Digital Communications and Energy Systems.

Commercialisation and technology transfer

The Head of Department of the Electrical Engineering Department also served as the Chairman of the Wolfson Microelectronics Institute (WMI), the industrial arm of the Department. WMI had the three-fold mission of “improving the training of engineers in microelectronics through exposure to industrial developments and practice, to introduce new microelectronics technology into industry, and to exploit commercially the research ideas conceived in the University”. WMI first majored in charge-coupled device (CCD) based filters for sonar applications (with John Mavor), helium speech unscrambling for deep sea divers (with Meryvn Jack), and image processing.  Later the focus was on microprocessor applications and application-specific integrated circuits. By 1984 the annual turnover had reached £700,000.

The Wolfson Microelectronics Institute was floated on the Stock Exchange in January 1985 as the private company, Wolfson Microelectronics. The company’s growth accelerated markedly with the move into audio signal processing products with the turnover, in 1998, being £14 million. David Milne was the Managing Director until 2007, some years before its 2014 acquisition by Cirrus Logic for $500 million.

Over the same period the Department’s VLSI research was led to Peter Denyer who was appointed to the Advent chair of Integrated Electronics.  His initial research on Silicon Compiler led on to the formation in 1990 of the Image sensors Company, VLSI Vision Systems (VVL). They designed CMOS image sensors on silicon chips for mobile phones in a simpler more cost effective technology than the Charge-coupled device. This continued until in 1998 when VVL was sold to ST Microelectronics for £23 million. However, this activity still continues today in Edinburgh as the Imaging Division of ST Microelectronics. Denyer’s PhD student, Oliver Vellacot left to form his video security company Indigo Vision.

Ian Underwood carried out research and development on liquid crystal microdisplays between 1983 and 1999. He contributed to the formation of Micropix Technologies (now Forth Dimension Displays) before becoming, in 1998, a co-founder of MicroEmissive Displays and co-inventor of its microdisplay technology. He received a 2004 Guinness world record for the smallest colour TV screen.

With active commercialisation HoD’s of EE served on the Board for the University’s Centre for Industrial Consultancy and Liaison whose mission was to negotiate contracts and consultancies placed by industry. The University refined this arrangement in 1983 to create the company, UNIVED Technologies including industrial training activities. This later became Edinburgh Research and Innovation (ERI) and, with support from Edinburgh District Council, dedicated space was created in the new Technology Transfer Centre (TTC) to facilitate company formation and spin-out.

The EE Department also formed EUMOS to support in-company training courses in integrated circuit design, microfabrication and signal processing. These courses were delivered by academics along with WMI staff. 

In 1983 it was proposed that The University of Edinburgh should anchor for the ALVEY programme a Speech Recognition Demonstrator embodying all our Information Technology disciplines securing £4 million of funding. John Laver (from linguistics) and Mervyn Jack became the Principal Investigators for this demonstrator project. Mervyn continued his work on Dialogue Engineering and Usability Engineering, for major customers such as British Telecom and Lloyds Bank within his Centre for Communications Interface Research which moved to The Kings Buildings site in 2003.

Awards and recognition

Over the years the Electrical Engineering Department at the University of Edinburgh made considerable developments in research and commercialisation (through VVL and Wolfson Microelectronics) and this was recognised in the UK Research Assessment Exercises when the Department was awarded the top ranking (5*) in the 1996 and 2001 research assessments. Notable achievements include:

1994 - Ian Underwood was co-recipient of a Photonics Spectra Circle of Excellence Award with Boulder Nonlinear Systems.

1997 - VVL received a Queen's Award for Industry. In 1998 Peter Denyer was awarded the Royal Academy of Engineering's Silver medal. He also received a Queen's Award for Technology for his work on CMOS systems, as well as an IEEE Millennium Medal.

2004 - Peter Grant received the IEE Faraday Medal and Ian Underwood the European Semiconductor Start-up Award, the latter followed in 2005 with the IEE Innovation in Engineering Award for Emerging Technology.

2006 - David Milne was declared Entrepreneur of the Year by the CBI and Wolfson Microelectronics was named as Company of the Year.

2008 - Denyer, Renshaw, Wang and Lu were recognised with the Rank Prize in Optoelectronics. When accepting the prize, Denyer said: "Our work was not always so well regarded, certainly in its earliest days when the doubters were many and the believers were... well, just ourselves."