<p>Just a curious HS student wondering about what computer engineers do?</p>
<p>I am VERY interested in studying CompE in college…</p>
<p>Not sure what all CompE people do but my roommate works for a small defense contractor. They specialize in air->ground communication.</p>
<p>They also do a lot of custom ball mount camera applications like one can see on Reapers and Predators and various law enforcement aircraft. He basically works in a team with an aeronautical and mechanical engineer designing and coding the software to run the hardware. I’m not sure about the policy of links but if you google Dragoon Tech they’ll show up.</p>
<p>His company recently ran a demonstration of radios carried by soldiers that instead of relying on a satellite or a single plane (like an E-3 Sentry AWACS) to carry their signals can randomly hop from one aircraft to another (usually small prop planes or helicopters) on the fly. This allows more localized communications that don’t set off electronic warfare detection systems.</p>
<p>That’s a specialized example I guess.</p>
<p>As I’m still an undergraduate I am aiming more toward the UAV side of things. I am currently interviewing for a research internship that is attempting to remove the heavy wiring and equipment set ups required for UAV’s and move toward small portable, laptop sized wireless setups. This requires not only new hardware solutions but low level software to run it.</p>
<p>That is CompE at it’s core. A marriage of electrical engineering and computer science.</p>
<p>I’ve heard that most CompE majors wind up as programmers, lots of low-level software, embedded systems, etc. I think only a minority actually wind up doing things like designing ASICs or microprocessors but I do not have any hard data to back that assumption up.</p>
<p>Computer engineering is not a career, its just a college major. And I think TomServo got it right.</p>
<p>I would say that a fair amount of them do pure software development, a smaller amount of them do embedded software development, and then a minority are working with hardware like FPGA/ASIC development.</p>
<p>Although I myself am a CompE major, I do not hesitate to admit I know not a thing of it’s constituencies besides it being a marriage of CompSci and EE, as someone rightly said before me.</p>