Difference between Electrical and Electronics Engineering?

[eengineer]

Just recently went to a career fair to look for potential places to apply for an internship. The career fair was being hosted by a different university, and probably around 99% of the booths that attended listed electrical engineering as a field that they were seeking, but I'm studying electronics engineering. Just wondering if anyone knew the clear difference between the two

[poptones]

Electrical engineering may entail routinely working with hvac systems, maybe lightning vulnerabilities and such. Not too much of that in typical electronics engineering.

If you want a sure career with good benefits, get a journeyman's card and become an instrument electrician. You get to wrk with plds, controllers and such and you get union benefits which means living anywhere and getting good pay and keeping your retirement and health insurance as long as you keep up your dues.

My first boss was a degreed mechanical engineer. He helped design the rear suspension of some model of Mustang. But he was doing electrical stuff all the time. The basic formulas migrate pretty readily: shock absorbers, valves, orifices, resistors, caps, inductors. Calculate the energy charge on a capacitor, you're evoking Einstein.

[caffeinatedbard]

@eengineer-- It would be helpful to state where you hail from. 

poptones, for example, has a different description than I would offer, and I am not saying he is wrong.  I got my B.S. in Electrical Engineering in the US and I am doing embedded systems design involving mixed-signal disciplines which is far from HVAC systems.  Perhaps outside the US the distinction is more polarized than what I am used to for differentiating electrical and electronics engineering. 

Cheers,
bard

[eengineer]

thanks for the replies guys. I'm third year electronics engineering in the US. From my experience so far Ive delt with a lot of digital logic design. ive taken 2 solid state classes so far, but im much more comfortable with flip flops than i am capacitors and mosfets

[poptones]

No I'm from the US. And I didn't mean to imply that one would ONLY be working on HVAC systems, for example, or even that one should get an engineering degree simply to become an electrician.

Like any form of technical degree, one has to focus on a specialty. What I meant was you're not going to find many who specialize in micros and firmware working on power grid networks. The last uniy where I went to school (Mississippi State) there was an EE path a a CE path and the biggest distinction between them was the focus on computing systems. Similarly, the difference between EE and electronics engineering would be more specialization in... well, electronics.

I do think it's naive to think what you're doing in your twenties you will be doing in your forties. I know that may also sound obvious, but when one is young one can do certain things that one cannot do later in life, but there are things one can only do once one has attained a certain maturity. Being 42 or 43 and having a good retirement already is a position one should put oneself in if at all possible (and I say this from the school of hard knocks, as I do not have such a nest egg).

I was a CE major because I suck at algebra and so much CS "math" is, to me at least, pretty much intuitively obvious. Still, I squeaked by on my boolean algebra class even though my lab notes were so good the instructor himself told me he was was copying and studying them. But I hate factoring, and I can't even remember how to make a K-map any more...

[IanB]

I had never really thought there was a difference. Electrical engineering is the broad term that encompasses the whole industry and whole range of specializations, including electronics. Electronic engineering might be a way of indicating a more specialized field of study, but that would not necessarily be to your advantage if you were looking for a strong education. Sometimes people may talk of electrical and electronic engineering just to make it clear that electronics is not left out of the picture.

[Kremmen]

A view from outside the US: Around here electronics engineer does what most people discuss on this board and some other things as well (more emphasis on design i would say).
Electrical enginees on the other hand are involved mainly in power generation, power grid and distribution, heavy (industrial, commercial) installations, high voltage systems, stuff like that. Of course the distinction in practical life is not clear cut; there is overlap, sometimes considerably. The specific skills and tools are different even though both disciplines are about pushing electrons.

[AndyC_772]

I've always regarded the distinction as quite clear:

Electrical engineering is concerned with electricity as a source of power.
Electronic engineering is concerned with electricity as a means to convey information.

[HackedFridgeMagnet]

I've always regarded the distinction as quite clear:

Electrical engineering is concerned with electricity as a source of power.
Electronic engineering is concerned with electricity as a means to convey information.

That does seem a reasonable definition, but what about Power Electronics? There are grey areas between the two. Some of them on the same board.

[cqmiao]

1?Powerful
2?Micro

[EEVblog]

I had never really thought there was a difference. Electrical engineering is the broad term that encompasses the whole industry and whole range of specializations, including electronics. Electronic engineering might be a way of indicating a more specialized field of study, but that would not necessarily be to your advantage if you were looking for a strong education. Sometimes people may talk of electrical and electronic engineering just to make it clear that electronics is not left out of the picture.

Yes, they are essentially the same. Few employers would care you if have a generic "electrical" degree (the most common type by far), or some more specialised "electronics" variety.

In Oz here you don't have much of a choice. Most uni's generally just offer generic EE or bust. A few seem to call them "electronics" or combined "electrical/electronics" though. I don't know any that offer separate "electrical" and "electronics" degrees.

Dave.

[madires]

Over here EEs studied electrical engineering and choosed a field to specialize in (based on which fields the university offers). Typical fields are communications, automation, energy tech (HV), technical CS, medical tech or aeronautics. With the migration to bachelor/master that changed a little bit, e.g. electrical engineering and technical CS as field became technical CS. So I consider an electrical engineer to be the same as an electronics engineer.

[Mechatrommer]

you dont deal with semiconductor you are not electronics.

[mikeselectricstuff]

There is a simple threshold : anything over 10 amps is Electrical, anything below 1 amp is electronics. Note there is some hysteresis.

[IanB]

There is a simple threshold : anything over 10 amps is Electrical, anything below 1 amp is electronics. Note there is some hysteresis.

I refer the honourable gentleman to this post...

https://www.eevblog.com/forum/general-chat/some-musings-on-the-traction-current-of-an-electric-train/msg114506/#msg114506

...wherein something like 3000 A is being processed by the variable frequency drive for the traction motors. Clearly no electronics involved there then   

[eengineer]

OP is satisfied with responses, thanks all!

[Kremmen]

There is a simple threshold : anything over 10 amps is Electrical, anything below 1 amp is electronics. Note there is some hysteresis.

I refer the honourable gentleman to this post...

https://www.eevblog.com/forum/general-chat/some-musings-on-the-traction-current-of-an-electric-train/msg114506/#msg114506

...wherein something like 3000 A is being processed by the variable frequency drive for the traction motors. Clearly no electronics involved there then   

I don't really see the relevance of the actual main circuit current to the question whether one involved is electrical or electronics.
Back in the day i used to work for Stromberg the then biggest power electronics, electric traction (think trams, trains, icebreakers, Azipod) and electric drive manufacturer in Finland and maybe in all of Scandinavia; nowadays part of Asea Brown Boveri. My job was mostly designing and in case of digital, also programming control systems for paper mill drives, steel rolling mills and similar fixed installations. Those systems were chock full of control electronics designed by _electronics_ engineers like myself. There were _electrical_ engineers who designed the medium voltage (25 kV) supply systems and the main distribution, power factor compensation and whatnot related to the delivery of power - we just controlled it. The two groups of engineers were not really interchangeable, although we each understood and knew on a general level what the other guys did.

Sometimes the currents were as low as tens of amps in case of a small switchback roller drive in a newsprint coater. Other times it could be close to half a million amps as in the case of a copper electrolysis plant (with main rectifiers concentrically installed in wooden cabinets and glass doors in order to avoid current congestion and hysteresis heating).
And controlling that power was not always an easy trick. I can still recall a big Sendzimir roller mill for stainless steel and its 2x10MW tandem main drive. Designing that control system in our team produced some 7-8 thesis papers on the various details of motor and material control. A tricky one, that mill. The very fast accelerating DC motors developed armature current at the rate of 12 kA/ms and nobody in the world manufactured (or still manufactures, afaik) fuses capable of breaking that kind of energy. So one of the thesis papers was dedicated solely on the issue of armature circuit control and overcurrent handling. (Solution: big pressurized nitrogen DC breaker units).
So there is definitely power in electronics and electronics in power. The overlap is wide in some areas at least.

[AndyC_772]

I've always regarded the distinction as quite clear:

Electrical engineering is concerned with electricity as a source of power.
Electronic engineering is concerned with electricity as a means to convey information.

That does seem a reasonable definition, but what about Power Electronics? There are grey areas between the two. Some of them on the same board.

Sure - but consider what most of the signals in (say) a mains PSU actually are. They're mostly to do with pulse width modulation, current sensing, feedback and compensation, EMC, fault protection and so on... all within the realm of electronic engineering per my definition.

The electrical engineering bits would, I'd argue, be things like the input and output connectors and cables, physical installation, fuses and circuit breakers, maybe temperature control.

[Mechatrommer]

@AndyC_772: my earlier post is an extension (or root?) to your definition. ask people if they can beat it, not my definition actually, its from something i read. here's another definition: electronics is when you are dealing with electricity "controlling" electricity, which is still something got to do with semiconductors (my earlier post).