Eecs 470: Fill & Download for Free

MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley, CMU, Michigan, UTexas (unbelievably cheap for what you get assuming no financial aid), UIUC, Cornell, and a few more.I am biased, but I consider Michigan to be the best for Computer Engineering for industry. No other school has undergraduate classes as difficult and fulfilling as EECS 470 Computer Architecture and EECS 427 VLSI (and I invite anyone to post challengers in the comments). Even students who performed merely average in these classes end up getting hired at premier chip design firms such as Intel and AMD and go on to have extremely successful careers.

I enjoyed it a lot.I felt like the program emphasized practical skills, and taught a lot of programming fundamentals. As far as I know, they still teach C++ for the intro courses which comes with all of the nastiness of pointers and memory management; however, I personally felt this was more beneficial than detrimental because it makes you actually understand the lower levels of computation.As an undergrad in engineering, you will need to complete at least two large-scale project courses: one in your freshman year, and one once you are almost done with your upper division courses (so-called senior design project). The freshman engineering project course I took was called "Music and Microprocessors", though I believe the name has now changed. It was (and I hope is) a fantastic course that takes you through basic processors, Verilog, and assembly all culminating in a larger project written in assembly to be run on an FPGA.At the other end of your CS degree, you have a senior design project. In CS, I would have been able to take a game design course (eecs 494), a large-scale software engineering course (eecs 481), a microprocessor design course (eecs 470) or an open ended project course (eecs 497). Some of these may have changed. However, the gist of these courses is to spend an extended period of time working on, managing, and developing a large scale project.As for the general coursework, many of the early classes are autograder based. Read a spec, implement according to the spec, and submit it for a battery of unit and integration tests. Though not usually taught as test driven development, there are a number of similarities. In fact, some of the courses even require student submitted test cases to try to ensure that we think about how software can fail.

All three are very strong in Computer Architecture, and enjoy great recognition in the industry. Your own strengths and weaknesses will outweigh the differences between those programs.At Wisconsin and CMU, the CS and ECE departments are separate, with some hardware professors being at CS (Guri Sohi at Wisc, and Randy Bryant at CMU). I may be wrong, but if you are interested in RTL entry and consider Wisconsin, the CS department may be more appropriate. At CMU, the ECE department seems more appropriate, and at Michigan it does not matter, as explained next.At Michigan, the ECE and CSE divisions are parts of the EECS department -- hardware courses (including EECS 470 Computer Architecture and EECS 478 Logic Synthesis and Optimization) have a mix of ECE and CSE students, who have access to both ECE and CSE professors. I previously hired research assistants and PhD students from both ECE and CSE programs (including MS students who were RAs for the last three semesters).Michigan and CMU have a more comprehensive selection of courses (and Professors) in Computer-Aided Design, which you may find relevant.I don't know about job fairs at CMU and WIsconsin, but Michigan has huge job fairs, with every major company present and some smaller companies. A lot of our alumni work at at Intel's California and Oregon locations, AMD and Samsung in Austin, TX, at various locations at IBM, at Marvel and Qualcom in California, etc.The course load at Michigan is significant, and there is a very large selection of courses (both ECE and CSE divisions have grown significantly in the last 5 years). Some of the toughest courses include large team projects (such as designing a 5-stage pipelined microprocessor in Verilog and making sure it works, or designing a full chip and preparing it for manufacturing).There are also seminar courses that cover recent research and industry trends.As for as location goes, I am guessing that Ann Arbor and Madison are comparable.