Electrical Engineering
The Department of Electrical Engineering (EE) at IIT Palakkad offers a vibrant environment for under graduate, post graduate education and research in many areas of Electrical Engineering. We are a team of 16 faculty, 180 students and 5 staff members engaged in cutting edge research and teaching in several frontier areas of Electrical Engineering.
The major areas of research in the Electrical Engineering discipline at IIT Palakkad are as follows.
Biomedical Signal Processing and Imaging: Prof. Vinod A Prasad, Dr. Mahesh R Panicker
Communication and Signal Processing: Dr. Jobin Francis, Dr. Lakshmi Narasimhan Theagarajan
Power Electronics and Power Systems: Dr. Anirudh Guha, Dr. Arun Rahul, Dr. Manas Kumar Jena
Sensors, Measurements and Instrumentation: Dr. Sreenath Vijayakumar, Dr. Arvind Ajoy
Control and robotics: Dr. Vijay Muralidharan, Dr. Shaikshavali Chitraganti, Dr. Sneha Gajbhiye
RF and Microwave including Antennas, Radars and Signal Processing: Dr. Sukomal Dey, Dr. Swaroop Sahoo
Digital VLSI Design: Dr. Subrahmanyam Mula
Nanoelectronics, Plasmonics & Semiconductor Devices: Dr. Revathy Padmanabhan, Dr. Arvind Ajoy
Programs
B.Tech in Electrical Engineering: The B.Tech. program will be of 8 semesters duration. The EE B.Tech curriculum is periodically updated. The courses for this programme fall into five major categories: Basic sciences, Basic Engineering Theory / Skills and Professional Major & Minor Theory and Laboratory, and Humanities and social sciences. The UG lab facilities boast of equipment that serve to expand the understanding gained from theoretical courses. The curriculum is also flexible enough to provide exposure to interdisciplinary areas and through open-ended lab and B.Tech projects, students are given the opportunity to bring their ideas to fruition.
M.Tech in Power Electronics and PowerSystems (PEPS) : In the modern power systems, power electronics is a key enabling technology and understanding of the diverse disciplines like Semiconductor devices, Power converters, control theory Power conversion techniques and its application in power systems etc. is therefore essential to all power engineers. Our vision in starting an M.Tech Programme in Power Electronics and Power System is to “Develop and maintain a high quality teaching and research environment in Power Electronics and Power Systems and to emerge as a centre of excellence for contributing towards the society”. The M.Tech. program will be of 4 semesters duration. The courses include core courses, programme electives, and open elective. The M.Tech program has been offered in the stream of Electrical Engineering since August 2020.
M.Tech in System on Chip Design (SoCD) is an interdisciplinary program that is jointly offered by the Computer Science and Engineering and Electrical Engineering disciplines. This program delves deep into various challenges faced, and techniques used to solve them, when designing and integrating various sub-systems into a chip. Further details can be found at https://iitpkd.github.io/msocd/.
Master of Science (by Research) and Ph.D in Electrical Engineering: The MS in Electrical Engineering is an entry-level program which is targeted at motivated engineering graduates who wish to pursue a research degree. A rigorous coursework is prescribed to complement the research focus. The flagship research program in Electrical Engineering is the Doctorate in Philosophy (Ph.D). Excellent laboratory facilities with research equipment, high performance computing cluster etc. are available for students to carry out cutting edge research in an area of their choice. Funded projects secured by various faculty members provide relevant research problems for students to work on. A vibrant research atmosphere is available in the institute to encourage research students to realise their dreams to pursue careers in research, academia and industry. The research student community is very active and is motivated to engage with peers at various levels in order to widen their understanding. Students are also encouraged to publish papers in journals and conferences in India and abroad. The attention to the aspirations of each student is a hallmark of the program which is achieved through a progress monitoring system.
Teaching Labs
General Electronics Laboratory: The General Electronics Laboratory is set up in the Transit campus of IIT Palakkad. This space is being used to run lab courses in Digital and Analog Electronics, Digital Signal Processing, Computer Aided Design & PCB fabrication and Computer Organization. For this purpose, the lab is equipped with 42 workbenches -- each with a power computer, a 100 MHz Digital Storage Oscilloscope (from KeySight), a 60 MHz Arbitrary Waveform Generator (from Tektronix) and a Multi-Output power supply. A stencil printer, vacuum pick-n-place and reflow oven are available for fine PCB work with surface mount components.
Electrical Machines Laboratory: This laboratory is set up in the Transit Campus. It consists of two different kinds of machine setups -- (i)Fourteen sets of composite machine beds having an AC generator coupled to a DC machine coupled to another DC machine coupled to an AC motor. These machine beds allow the student to perform various experiments at the same setup. The data is collected on to a digitised system using a data acquisition card and is easily displayed on a computer making use of LABVIEW. (ii) Two sets of dissectible machines setup (from Delorenzo) are used for showing the inside construction and working of various DC and AC machine parts and types.
Power Systems Laboratory: This laboratory houses equipment to teach students key practical concepts in modern electric power systems. To this end, the equipments include (i) Alternator fault simulator to study about various faults, (ii) a setup to study the operation of overcurrent and earth fault relays, (iii) a setup to study the parallel operation of alternators using a differential protection scheme and (iv) Photovoltaic simulator to study the integration of PV power to grid (v) Equipment to measure earth and insulation resistance.Licenses for the Mipower, PSCAD and DSA Tools power system analysis software to simulate versatile grid conditions including faults, power system stability, load flow studies etc have also been procured.
Microwave and Communication Systems Laboratory: Several software defined radios (SDRs) from National Instruments are used in this laboratory. The SDRs can be configured through software to act as a transceiver for any wireless communication system such as FM, WiFi, GPS, GSM, LTE, etc. The SDRs housed in our laboratory can transmit RF signals up to 6GHz in frequency to 50MHz in bandwidth. Prototyping, testing and research on new and novel wireless communication techniques for 5G, sensor networks, IoT, etc. can be performed using these devices. To introduce our students to the process of testing Microwave and Radio Frequency components, a four-port 8 GHz Vector Network Analyzer (from Rohde and Schwarz), a Signal Analyzer (from Keysight) for measurements up to 7 GHz, and a Signal Generator (from Tektronix) have been procured. The lab is also stocked with various microwave components like amplifiers, oscillators, mixers, filters, directional couplers and antennas operating from 1 GHZ to 10 GHz.
VLSI and Microelectronics: Licenses for the industry standard Integrated Circuit design tool from Cadence have been purchased. This tool allows students to understand the standard workflow involved in the design of analog and digital ICs. We have also purchased licenses for the Sentaurus device simulation software from Synopsys. This is also an industry standard tool where students understand the flow of electrons and holes inside semiconductor devices like diodes and transistors. These tools will also be heavily used by research scholars working in the VLSI area. On the hardware side, an ample stock of FPGA (from Xilinx), Microcontroller (Arduinos and Texas Instruments), DSP (fixed and floating point from Texas Instruments) and Embedded System boards (Raspberry PI with accessories) is maintained to facilitate hands-on learning. We also leverage the equipment available in the Central Instrumentation and Central Micro-Nano Fabrication facilities for teaching and research. These include : RF and DC probe stations, semiconductor parameter analyzer, solar simulator, cleanroom with access to sputtering, lithography and wetbenches.
Control and Robotics: The control lab has software and hardware components. All the analysis and control designs are done in softwares (like MATLAB or LabView or Python), which interface with hardware setup to validate the design. Studies like system identification and finding range of a parameter for the system stability are carried out in simulation softwares. A number of table top experiments have been designed and locally fabricated. These include Wheeled Mobile Robots, Ball on a beam setups, Inverted Pendulum setups and Magnetic Levitation setups to introduce our students to some interesting problems in control engineering.
Measurements and Instrumentation: The Measurements & Instrumentation lab is well equipped with sophisticated instruments like the NI ELVIS-III board that serves as a complete solution for circuit implementation and its analysis. The LCR meter (Keysight E4980AL- 20 Hz to 1 MHz) in the instrumentation lab is used for measuring various passive element parameters at high accuracy. An ample number of experiments using various transducers such as LVDT and strain gauge can be performed simultaneously. The lab also contains a large stock of MyDAQ Data Acquisition systems from National Instruments and Arduino boards. The lab has the capability to host virtual lab using LabVIEW software.
