Electrical Engineering and Information Technology

Even in the online semester, you are not on your own. With the “Mentoring Whispers“, our mentors Christine Sander und Iris Heisterklaus have compiled valuable tips to support you while studying from home.

Are you interested in an appointment for a mentoring conversation? You can find further information on the mentoring program of our faculty on our website.

Overview of Bachelor’s Degree Programs

On this page you will find exciting information and personal reports from students as well as an overview of the Bachelor’s Degree Programs.

• Electrical Engineering, Information Technology and Computer Engineering (B.Sc.)
• Computer Engineering (B.Sc.)
• Business Administration and Engineering – Electrical Power Engineering (B.Sc.)
• Teacher degree courses for the teaching profession at secondary schools (for German speakers) (B.Sc.)
• Teacher training for the teaching profession at high schools and comprehensive schools (for German speakers) (B.Sc.)
• Electrical Engineering with orientation semester (ETOS) (B.Sc.)

From left: Stefanie Samaan, Ricarda Kriete, Carolin Guntermann, Sophia Tepe, Lina Fischer, Muriel Krüger, Jana Einsiedle, Claire Lambriex ©Martin Braun

A look at the team from the chair of Transmission Grids and Energy Economics at the Institute of High Voltage Equipment and Grids, Digitalization and Energy Economics (IAEW) presents a pleasing picture for the field of electrical engineering: almost a third of its researchers are female.

The share of women in engineering has increased in recent years, and female engineers are a natural part of an institute team. All of the female researchers in the team have completed a degree in the field of electrical engineering and then decided to complete a doctorate at the university and start their professional career here. Of course, working in electrical engineering requires a certain interest in science and technology, but the key to success and fun is usually the curiosity to understand new things.

We are always motivated by the question: ‘How does this work?’, says Lina Fischer, who is researching a robust planning model for the future energy system.

The next step is simply to have the bravery to actively pursue these questions – even if it means venturing into the unknown.

© Martin Braun

Everyone at the IAEW is driven by the vision of researching and developing solutions for the energy transition. The work at the chair of Transmission Grids and Energy Economics is primarily focusing the question:

„How should we design the future energy system so that it is environmentally friendly, reliable and economically efficient?“

This covers a wide range of interesting aspects. For example, lot of research is done on how the large amounts of energy from photovoltaic and wind energy plants, as well as alternative energy sources such as hydrogen, can be integrated into the current energy system. The transmission grid for electricity is essential for this. It can be seen in everyday life, for example, by the high-voltage power lines running alongside the freeways. The transmission grid enables electricity transport over long distances and thus the transport of large amounts of energy from wind turbines in northern Germany to regions with high electricity consumption. Current projects at the chair are investigating how the transmission grid needs to be expanded and operated in the future in order to facilitate the energy transition. Research is also ongoing in determining the locations where power lines to offshore wind turbines in the North and Baltic Seas should be connected to the grid or where large electrolysis plants for the production of hydrogen should be positioned. In addition to the technical aspects of the components, these studies must also take economic aspects into account, such as the costs arising from investments or possible congestions in the transmission grid.

In general, the consideration of economic and market aspects plays a major role in the transformation of the energy system. European efforts to further strengthen electricity trading between the individual countries are leading to increasing electricity exchanges in Europe and thus to further challenges for the transmission grid. The chair is therefore developing methods and models to simulate the European electricity markets. In this way, various future developments can be examined and their potential impact on market participants and the transmission grid can be analyzed.

A further focus of the chair is to deal with innovative concepts that will ensure the secure and reliable operation of transmission grids in the future and thus protect against blackouts. To this end, models and processes must be developed that can represent and investigate the dynamic system behavior of transmission grids and their components under changing conditions.

© Martin Braun

When you think of working at a university institute, your first thoughts usually revolve around working solely on your own research project. This often gives a false impression of work life at an institute, especially in the field of engineering. Work at the IAEW is characterized above all by the variety of different projects with both research and industrial partners. This allows you to get to know different topics and to gain a wide range of experience. You are often involved from the very beginning of the projects through working on them on to the presentation of the results. The different project teams make the collaboration very varied. In addition to scientific knowledge, your time at the institute gives you the opportunity to acquire a range of skills that qualify you for management positions in the industry.

Of course, you also experience many other things that make working at the institute worthwhile.

“In particular, the joint activities with other young colleagues after work, various institute traditions, parties and sporting events are all part of it.”

Notably, the IAEW also offers the opportunity to gain insight into the institute and its research topics through student assistant jobs or a thesis.

Be inspired and find your own way!
On our website we inform you about our study programmes.

© Martin Braun

Which study programme is right for me? And what will my working life look like?

During the orientation phase, we develop a first picture of our future professional life. This image is shaped by various influences, usually from our immediate environment: What are my parents’ professions? What did my teacher advise me to study? But as individual as we are, the possibilities are just as varied – and the more often we take the opportunity to gain an insight into different professions, the wider our field of vision becomes and the clearer our personal path appears.

The researchers at the Institute for High Voltage Equipment and Grids, Digitalization and Energy Economics (IAEW) at RWTH Aachen University share their professional and personal experiences in three articles. The scientists, each team work in one of the institute’s three chairs, have different research focuses. However, they all have one goal in common: to integrate their ideas into people’s lives and thus advance our society.

Among other things, they address the following questions:

• How can large amounts of energy from photovoltaic and wind power plants be integrated into our electricity system in the future?
• What challenges will arise from the increasing share of renewable energies and flexible consumers such as heat pumps and electric cars?
• What is necessary to ensure a reliable energy supply and to avoid blackouts?

What else will the scientists share with you:

• How do typical researchers think? Do they work alone on their own research projects?
• What are the career prospects after a PhD? Do science and business exclude each other?
• When did the desire to become an electrical engineer arise, what is a typical working day like and what role does work-life balance play?

© Martin Braun

Be inspired and find your own way!
On our website we inform you about our study programmes.

This years AixSense team at the SensUs competition 2024 ©RWTH

The RWTH team impresses with its biosensor for monitoring kidney failure

For the seventh time already, the 15 students of the AixSense team successfully took part in the SensUs competition, organised by Eindhoven University of Technology. This year, 18 teams competed against each other in the international competition with their point-of-care (PoC) biosensor solutions for the real-time detection of creatinine for monitoring acute kidney failure. The AixSense team also included 3 students from the Japanese partner university Tokyo Institute of Technology.

This year, AixSense won three out of five categories with its PoC and also took second place in the technological innovation and technical feasibility categories. Particularly noteworthy is the performance in the area of public relations and scientific communication: the team from Aachen received the Vlog Award for their video diary and AixSense also won the public voting for the Public Inspirations Award.

The Institute for Materials in Electrical Engineering 1 at RWTH Aachen University has been involved in the competition since 2018. Every year, Professor Sven Ingebrandt and Dr. Vivek Pachauri put together a team from various degree programmes. The team is supported by various structures and profile areas at RWTH, such as the Lab center for micro and nanotechnology (ZMNT), which advises the team on technical issues.

The annual competition encourages international and interdisciplinary collaboration in fields such as electrical engineering and micro-nanotechnology, transformative materials, biology, engineering and medical sciences, among others.

Interested parties can apply for the SensUs 2025 competition at pachauri@iwe1.rwth-aachen.de until November 2024.

Fast, faster, the speed of light – a characteristic of modern data communication and the reason why a physicist found her way into the electrical engineering world.

Rebecca is a physicist and has been working as a cleanroom engineer at the Institute of Integrated Photonics at RWTH Aachen University since 2020. Here she gives an exclusive insight into her everyday working life.

Career guidance is often a challenge for school students. Rebecca, how did you find your way?

“Even in primary school I was very interested and enthusiastic about STEM subjects. Thanks to a dedicated and motivated physics teacher at secondary school, I decided to study physics instead of maths and physics as a teacher. I wanted to keep my options open for the future. I ‘fell in love’ with research during my bachelor’s thesis and have stayed with it ever since.”

Photonics is the technical mastery of light, which has many fascinating properties. What is photonic-electronic integration?

“Most people are familiar with electronic microchips. Integrated photonics is now concerned with implementing these functionalities on photonic microchips, where photonic signals are carried, manipulated and measured instead of electrical signals. The two microchips can also be combined or integrated to take advantage of the best features of both technologies.”

A personnel airlock leads into the cleanroom. Rebecca wears abrasion-resistant clothing to protect the ultra-sensitive microchips.

The cleanroom provides a controlled environment for specialised manufacturing processes such as the production of photonic integrated circuits on computer chips. What conditions are required in the cleanroom and why?

“The extremely low-particle environment is obviously very important, because even the smallest dust particle that gets on a microchip during the manufacturing process can affect its functionality. In our cleanroom, for example, we have only 100,000 particles larger than 0.1 micrometres per cubic metre, compared to 150 to 1000 times more in normal ambient air. The relative humidity and temperature in the cleanroom are also strictly monitored and kept constant, as the chip manufacturing processes are very sensitive.”

Rebecca works on the die-bonder using flip-chip technology: for chips to work properly, they need to be assembled and interconnected. The design and manufacture of these connections is known as packaging.

Photonic-electronic integration is a key technology for digitalisation. It meets the challenge of transporting and processing more and more data as we move towards a new information society. How exactly does this technology contribute to the solution?

“Most people are familiar with fibre optic technology from everyday life. Its advantages in data transmission lie primarily in its speed, but also in its energy efficiency compared to copper technology. We use the same principle, just miniaturised on a chip. It is no longer called fibre optics, but waveguides – but the basic principle is the same!
The advantage of photonics in data communications, whether over long distances as fibre-optic cables or miniaturised in chips for data centres, is therefore speed: we are unlikely to go faster than the speed of light in the foreseeable future. Parallelisation is also a clear advantage: different signals can be transmitted in parallel at different wavelengths or polarisations.”

What groundbreaking developments is the Institute of Integrated Photonics involved in? Which projects are you especially excited about?

“We have a lot of exciting projects and my role has the advantage that I am basically involved in all of them. There are certainly two projects that are particularly exciting in terms of these future technologies.
In the ML4Q cluster, we are involved in the development of a quantum computer. Many people are probably aware of the importance of this technology, for example in the field of quantum cryptography and supercomputing. Our specific task in this project is to realise a highly efficient photonic interface between spin qubits.
In the NeuroSys cluster, the IPH is working on a physical neural network based on photonic neurons. It is therefore a photonic AI. However, due to the size of such neural networks integrated on chips, it is not so much an AI like Chat GPT, but rather highly specialised and trained networks that score points in data centres for their enormous speed.”

Rebecca’s office is a space for dynamic workflows and creative ideas.

What is your typical working day like?

“On a day-to-day basis, I sometimes work very application-oriented directly in chip production on the systems and also train other employees in the application. At the same time, a large part of my work consists of designing new production processes, advising my colleagues as an expert in clean room technology, scientific research and coordinating a lot of maintenance work, for example. I also have management responsibility for my small cleanroom team, which consists of one permanent employee and several students. Supervision of final theses is also part of my job.”

What does work-life balance mean to you?

“Work-life balance is very important to me. For me personally, it is really about balance. Last autumn, I had the privilege of becoming a mother to a beautiful little girl who is, of course, my world. Together with my partner, we have decided to share caring and paid work 50:50. For me, this is the perfect solution and the best of both worlds: playing and exploring with my daughter is great fun and keeps me grounded, while my job helps me to get out of the baby bubble and focus on intellectual issues.”

Are you in the process of career exploration? Stay tuned and be inspired by further insights into the working life of academics at RWTH Aachen University. Visit our website and find out more about our degree programmes.

Kinder im Hörsaal. ©RWTH Aachen University

Whether drought, floods or forest fires – the consequences of global warming are dramatic for nature and people. The countries of the global south are being hit particularly hard, but the effects are also being felt here. We experienced this at the latest with the devastating floods in July 2021. That is why we urgently need to address the issue of climate change. 

This is also what Dirk Uwe Sauer, Professor of Electrochemical Energy Conversion and Storage Systems Technology at RWTH Aachen University, is doing. He has been researching new energy systems for over 30 years and advises politicians on the energy transition.

„We see in all places that climate change is happening – with many negative consequences. And we urgently need a radical change in the way we have supplied ourselves with energy so far.“

This does not only affect us adults, but especially the children and young people of today. They will have to live with the limitations that climate change will bring. “I don’t think we should underestimate what children know and what they are capable of,” says Professor Sauer.

It is not too late to make a difference

In his lecture, the physicist not only explained the dangers of climate change, but also made the necessary changes understandable. He used various materials such as videos, slides and interactive presentations to show the physical basics and the possibilities through timely action: “I also want to spread optimism and show that things can also get better than they currently are. Because if we still grab the wheel in time, then we still have the possibility to avoid worse things.” For this to happen, however, society must overcome its fear of new technologies. The professor said that there is too much talk about the risks instead of seeing the opportunities. “And we simply can’t afford that now either.” A ruling by the Federal Constitutional Court in 2021 has obliged politicians, and thus the population, to act more quickly. The slower progress is made, the more the living conditions of the next generations are restricted. That is why the previous federal government tightened the climate protection targets and the Climate Protection Act. “We have the opportunity to achieve these goals. We have the necessary technologies to supply all eight billion people in the world properly with renewable energy,” Sauer said.

Climate change is an important issue that concerns us all. But what does it actually mean and how can we work against it? Professor Sauer explained this to the children in his lecture at the Children’s University on 16 June 2023. He showed them how the earth is warming up and what consequences this has for nature and people. He also presented solutions on how we can protect the climate with renewable energies and new technologies. For example, with solar cells that generate electricity from sunlight, or with electric cars that emit no exhaust gases. Professor Sauer showed the children not only the problems of climate change, but also the opportunities that arise from it. He showed them that we can not only influence the climate with our energy supply, but also promote biodiversity.

„I would like to show the children that, for example, large photovoltaic systems on open fields not only generate electricity, but also create space for extensive agriculture, for insects that can live and flourish in these areas again.“

Climate change is a major challenge that we can only overcome together. For this, we need an awareness of the connections between energy and the environment that starts with children. Another goal of the Children’s University event was to get the children excited about scientific topics. “Physics has the great advantage that it can illustrate things very vividly and also show connections,” said Sauer. Using simple means, Professor Sauer showed where research starts and what possibilities can arise through technical progress.

Source: Aachener Zeitung, 16 June 2023

BA student Helena in an interview with the ZDF heute journal team. Photo: C. Antweiler

At the end of January, the team from ZDF heute journal visited the Institute for Communication Systems at RWTH Aachen University for a report. The report provides insights into the topic of “women in MINT subjects”, which are sometimes chosen even less by women and girls, such as mathematics, computer science, natural science and technology. Editor Peter Böhmer from the North Rhine-Westphalia State Studio researched the reasons for the low quota of women at RWTH Aachen University and what approaches could be taken to change this.

Through interviews with various female RWTH students, including our BA student Helena, as well as with Univ. Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Aloys Krieg, Prorector for Teaching, the heute journal team was able to gain an impression. The Institute for Communication Systems and a lecture by Prof. Peter Jax provided the pictorial framework for the report.

You can find the report in the ZDF Mediathek.

© Stefan Hense

The Student Advice Centre of RWTH is offering workshop dates in the next few months to support pupils and prospective students in choosing the right degree programme. In small groups, relevant topics are worked on interactively, such as decision-making processes, exploration of interests and self-examination, as well as decision-making aids for the choice of degree programme.

Workshop dates:
Fri, September 9, 2022, 10am to 4pm
Wed, October 5, 2022, 10am to 4pm
Thu, November 10, 2022, 10am to 4pm
Thu, December 8, 2022, 10am to 4pm
Fri, January 20, 2023, 10am to 4pm

In the workshops, participants will be given tools that can support them in their own study orientation. Participation is particularly useful if it is voluntary and there is a willingness to work out one’s own study decision. Please note that the workshop will be held in German.

Participation is free of charge. All information on registration and further details can be found on the workshop page of the Student Advice Centre.

© Christiane Antweiler

The Institutes of Communications Engineering and Communication Systems of RWTH Aachen have participated in the Future Space “Smarte Kids – Smarte Stadt” of the OECHER LAB with the subject area of communication systems. In May and June 2022, this Future Space will present exhibits from the STEM field. In addition to communication systems, information can also be obtained on the topics of virtual reality, robotics & microcontrollers and CO₂ meters in a manner appropriate to the target group.

The exhibit of the RWTH institutes uses a video to show the performance of three generations of video coding methods that have been developed in recent years. An audio demonstration takes visitors on a short journey through the development of telephony. The goal of current research is spatial telephony, which is also exemplified in the audio track.

Discover our exhibits until the end of June in the OECHER LAB, Kapuziner Karree, Kapuzinergraben 19. For more information, please visit the OECHER LAB website.

© Christiane Antweiler

Copyright: Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst e.V. (DAAD)

The online fair “Studying worldwide – the virtual fair” will take place again this year. On March 25, 2022, students can get personal advice on studying or doing internships abroad. There will also be a wide-ranging program on financing options and recommended planning steps. Testimonials from former exchange students will give you personal insights that could be valuable for your own planning process.

• When? March 25, 2022, from 12:30pm to 4:30pm.
• Where? Online.

For more information and to register for free, visit the “Studying Worldwide” exhibition page.