Electronics and computer science

Join over 500 researchers working with industry and government to address some of the problems facing the world today.
Join over 500 researchers working with industry and government to address some of the problems facing the world today.
Electronics and computer science (ECS) is the leading university department of its kind in the UK. We were on of the first universities to be named an Academic Centre of Excellence in Cyber Security Education (ACE-CSE) by the UK government.
Our research is organised around research groups and centres. You'll join one of these groups. This means that specialist academics will always be on hand to hear your ideas and offer help and encouragement. With around 250 staff, ECS has unrivalled depth and breadth of expertise.
You'll have the freedom to run your own project and you'll be supported by a team of supervisors. Direct and regular contact with your supervisors will help you develop your scientific insight, and steer you towards creative and original thinking.
Our graduate school provides training on transferable skills, courses on research methodology, and a working framework to help you settle into a disciplined working routine. You'll also have opportunities to travel to international conferences and events to present your work.
ECS holds an annual careers fair that attracts major companies. The majority of our graduates take up roles in the technology industry or develop their research interests further. If you have a great idea our Future Worlds startup accelerator is there to nurture aspiring entrepreneurs through one-to-one support and its network of investors.
We offer 2 PhD routes.
This is our standard 3-year research degree. When you apply, you'll choose one of the following:
Our iPhD includes a taught first year. This is a good option if you're changing your field of study or have a background in industry. We offer these 4-year funded options through our Centres for Doctoral Training (CDT). Currently we offer the following research areas:
A key feature of ECS is that we are truly interdisciplinary. Many of our research groups sit at the interface between electronics and computer science, including cyber security and cyber physical systems. Areas include:
You can either apply for a structured studentship or propose your own PhD idea.
Structured studentships are advertised PhD projects with a title, supervisor, remit and funding already in place. These projects have been set up through collaborations with industry, external partners or they may have been provided through one of several centres for doctoral raining which we take part in.
Taking one of our structured studentships will give you access to additional training, conferences and secondments.
Both Mid-IR and Raman molecular fingerprint spectroscopies have been shown to be powerful bio-diagnostic tools for specific biomarkers. Enhancing the sensitivity and improving the detection limit of current Mid-IR and Raman spectroscopic platforms are most important to exploit them for early diagnosis of disease biomarkers in point of care setting.
Work with us on this exciting and cutting-edge research at The National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Southampton Biomedical Research Centre (BRC).
Novel crystalline photonic devices offer exciting opportunities for creating efficient lasers and manipulating the properties of light. Pulsed Laser Deposition (PLD) is an extraordinary technique using light to create new materials.
Studying mechanical properties of large, complex structures such as a space launch vehicles or Earth’s crust relies on a large array of sophisticated and often, expensive sensors. Due to budget constraints, the number of sensing nodes deployed in such projects are limited to a few hundred which limits the scale and scope of these studies.
Impulsive control systems (ICS) have received attention in the last decade in a wide range of applications, especially biomedical applications such as cancer treatment. This project is expected to benefit both oncology and control theory fields. You will have a unique opportunity to contribute in developing a rethinking of how the treatment is administrated in oncological clinics.
Fibre lasers that are increasingly becoming the light source of choice for a wide range of industrial and scientific applications, have spurred the development of new types of rare-earth (i.e., Yb, Er, Tm, and Ho) doped fibres, each with a unique set of properties to match with the specific applications. Since the fibre design and material properties of the fibre core have become critical to the performance of the fibre laser, a more powerful fibre fabrication process is required than the current industry standard process, which is MCVD (Modified Chemical Vapour Deposition) - solution doping technique.
Electronic textiles, or e-textiles, refers to the addition of electronics, sensors, actuators, energy harvesters and energy storage within fabric materials. Textiles are the most common material humans come into physical contact with, so e-textiles provide a ubiquitous platform for a new class of wearable technology where the electronics are hidden and undetectable within otherwise standard items of clothing.
Electronic textiles, or e-textiles, refers to the addition of electronics, sensors, actuators, energy harvesters and energy storage within fabric materials. Textiles are the most common material humans come into physical contact with, so e-textiles provide a ubiquitous platform for a new class of wearable technology where the electronics are hidden and undetectable within otherwise standard items of clothing.
Applications are invited for a fully funded PhD studentship (UK fees and International) to work on triboelectric energy harvesting within garments.
Two dimensional (2D)-materials are currently at the forefront of an exciting wave of scientific research. Compared to bulk materials, the high confinement in the 2D plane gives rise to unique optical and electronic properties that are advantageous for wide-ranging applications. However, from a photonics perspective, interacting with very thin layers can be inefficient, so that clever techniques must be applied to enhance the light-matter interaction and achieve high quality devices.
Work with us on this exciting cutting-edge research in future directions of User-Centred Interactive Information Access (FUCIA), which aims to design and develop future information access technologies for different user information needs in different context.
Hollow core fibres (HCFs) are an exciting, novel optical fibre technology where light is guided in an air-filled core. We are a world-leading group, which designs, characterises and fabricates state-of-the-art HCFs in our specialist facilities. Recently we reported a new world record low loss for this type of optical fibre, making HCFs contenders for a diverse range of interesting applications, including telecommunications, high power laser delivery and novel medical diagnostics.
Generation of femtosecond and attosecond X-ray pulses using intense laser pulses has transformed ultrafast science. The ability to produce coherent ultrafast X-ray pulses has applications in many areas, from the investigation of ultrafast molecular dynamics to biomedical imaging.
Recent years have seen remarkable progress in the development of hollow core fibres (HCFs). Not only can HCFs transmit extreme laser power levels beyond the fundamental damage threshold of glass, but they can also achieve even lower propagation loss than traditional glass fibres, as demonstrated by researchers at the Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC). This progress has led to the demonstration of record kilowatt laser power transmission over a kilometre-range HCF, well beyond the capability of standard glass fibres.
You will investigate a route to high-power visible sources through cladding pumping of RE-doped silica fibres using GaN-LDs. You will be involved in the fabrication of RE (such as Pr3+, Dy3+ and Tb3+) - doped fibres in modified silica glass hosts offering low phonon energy while maintaining the other characteristics of silica fibres. Additionally, you will perform a detailed spectroscopic characterisation of the fabricated fibres and will be involved in the development of visible fibres. You will have access to the the state-of-the-art fibre fabrication facilities and laboratories at the Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC) in the Zepler Institute.
This project will focus on developing algorithms to allow autonomous systems to make decisions based on information they receive from sensors. Your work will be applied to distributed systems which operate in challenging environments.
The Web Science Institute (WSI) at the University of Southampton is offering PhD studentships for multidisciplinary doctoral research with a particular focus on Human-Centred Artificial Intelligence (AI).
An emerging research trend in cardiovascular sciences focuses on discovering useful diagnostic information from the dynamic analysis of concurrent physiological measurements, such as the electrocardiogram (ECG), continuous blood pressure, cerebral blood velocity, CO2 levels (capnography) etc. The aim of this PhD project is to develop new methods for the analysis of time series cardiovascular measurements. This will lead to faster and better targeted treatments for conditions such as stroke and head injury, resulting in improved brain protection and better outcomes for patients.
Moore’s Law is currently being challenged with Nvidia CEO recently claiming it is dead. The scaling of transistors cannot continue due to physical limitations of silicon. 2D semiconductors offer the solution as they can be scaled to the molecular level and create excellent devices such as transistors, light emitters, and photodetectors.
This project will explore the unique capability of hollow core fibres (HFC) for kilowatt-class laser power transmission over kilometre-range distances, as recently demonstrated at the Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC) [1]. The project will be mainly experimental but will also include some numerical modelling to support the work. The project work will take place across several research groups, covering state-of-the-art high-power laser facilities and world-leading hollow-core fibre fabrication, allowing the candidate to collaborate with experienced researchers in both fields to achieve the project objectives.
This PhD project explores machine learning techniques for affective computing that automates the process of recognising, interpreting and simulating human affects such as facial emotion generation. The current affective computing domain suffers from remarkable expenses and ambiguities on manual annotations.
Modern society depends massively on the generation, processing and transmission of vast amounts of data. It is predicted that by 2025, 175 zettabytes (175 trillion gigabytes) of data will be generated around the globe. Processing such huge amounts of data demands ever increasing computational power, memory and communication bandwidth. These demands cannot be sustainably met by conventional digital electronic technologies. Indeed, CMOS-based von Neumann architectures are now approaching a widely accepted ‘efficiency-wall’, a fundamental limit on the number of operations per unit energy, while the number of operations required continues to grow at unprecedented rates.
Electronic devices, such as computers, mobile phones and data centres, account for a significant amount of the world's energy consumption. Novel technologies are needed to deliver high-speed, low-power and efficient computing and communication.
You will develop innovative techniques for argumentation mining in multimodal contexts, focusing on audio and natural language processing (NLP) applications. Understanding arguments in various formats, such as text, audio and video, is essential for effective communication and informed decision-making, meaning Argumentation Mining is a highly relevant and impactful research area.
Distributed fibre optic sensing (DFOS) are becoming increasingly important for marine, maritime, glacial and urban environmental and infrastructure monitoring applications. They are important in scenarios where environmental vibrations can be complex and challenging such as seismic activity, underwater soundscapes, building’s structural integrity, traffic.
Fibre optics has transformed telecommunications and profoundly impacted industrial manufacturing, medical endoscopy and structural sensing. In many applications however, solid fibres are operating close to fundamental physical limits imposed by the glass forming their core. A transformative new technology is emerging where light is guided in air or vacuum, in a Hollow Core Fibre (HCF). HCFs have the potential to become the best optical waveguide ever produced and to bring positive impacts in many application fields.
Hollow-core optical fibres (HCFs) offer a radically new solution for laser delivery as they guide light in a gas-filled core, as opposed to glass in conventional optical fibres. HCF-based mid-infrared laser delivery systems could open exciting possibilities for diverse and valuable applications, including surgical treatment, gas sensing, and materials processing.
We are working in collaboration with a large EU consortium to create a reprogrammable neuromorphic photonic platform for a variety of applications from telecommunications to biosensing. We use the latest generation of phase change materials to create highly efficient in-memory photonic functionality with novel materials that allow the upscaling of the technology.
Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is a powerful tool for studying molecular structures and dynamics in samples. It has numerous applications, such as drug discovery and cancer diagnosis. However, the bulky size and high cost limit NMR’s widespread applications in medicine, biology and chemistry.
Artificial Intelligence has been hugely successful in solving complex tasks and a significant progress has been made in bringing the utility of deep neural networks on tiny resource-constrained embedded devices via optimizing inference. However, learning the deep learning models on the device still remains challenging due to the mismatch between the computation complexity of deep learning models against the resource availability on the device. In this project, we aim to tackle this challenge.
Electronic devices such as computers, mobile phones and data centres account for a significant amount of the world's energy consumption. We need to invent novel technologies to deliver high-speed, low-power, and efficient computing and communication.
We are looking for a PhD student to work on the design and numerical simulation of the next generation of high-power fibre lasers. This project is part of a major new initiative funded by the UK Research Council at the Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC), University of Southampton.
As advances are made in Artificial Intelligence (AI), the technology is being applied to health-related problems. For example, how we evaluate the trustworthiness of these systems in the health context.
Hollow-core optical fibres guide light in a central hole inside a silica microstructure. These newly developed fibres exceed traditional solid fibres used in the past 40 years in every metric: lower attenuation, nonlinearity, latency, and better high-power laser transmission. However, the central hole where light is transmitted is typically filled with air and for several applications even air limits the fibre performance.
Two dimensional (2D) van der Waals (vdW) materials, such as transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs) are emerging as revolutionary components in nanophotonics. Recently, defects and strains in these vdW materials have attracted considerable interest as they can be engineered to realise quantum light emission, such as single-photon emitters, a crucial element for the development of quantum information technologies.
We are delighted to invite applications for a 4-year interdisciplinary PhD studentship in VR content production for inclusive virtual education. Working with stakeholders at all stages, you will research, design, develop and test an open VR content production solution for educators and students. This will aim to overcome the barriers to the widespread adoption of VR in schools, using science to raise young people’s awareness and interest in health issues. This will also make positive changes to health-related attitudes.
Fibre lasers have seen a rapid development in output power and performance over the past three decades and have revolutionised the application space for photonics. However the development of fibre lasers with wavelength-flexible single-frequency sources is lagging other areas of fibre lasers research.
This project explores how computer vision and audio analysis can work in synergy to create new technologies. In particular, it focuses on audio-visual artificial intelligence (AVAI), which can be implemented in ultra-low power devices, including wearables, hearing aids and sensors. AVAI is crucial in a range of applications, from advanced hearing aid design to understanding scenes in urban and natural environments.
Wearable technologies are revolutionising our daily lives, integrating everyday objects into our clothes, accessories and even our bodies. How can we power these without using rigid batteries that require overnight charging? Using our body’s heat, thermoelectric generators can provide uninterrupted renewable energy for wearable devices.
We offer a wide range of fully funded studentships. We run several of our PhD studentships in partnership with doctoral training centres, meaning you'll benefit from enhanced training and guaranteed funding.
These studentships:
Doctoral training centres offer fully funded studentships which include:
We offer funded iPhD through our CDTs in:
We offer scholarships and teaching bursaries ourselves. Your potential supervisor can guide you on what is available.
If you’re an international student you may be able to apply for a scholarship from your country.
Find out more about scholarships
Once you've found a supervisor, they can help you with potential funding sources. We offer match funding in some cases.
You'll need to state how you intend to pay for your tuition fees when you submit your application.
Find out more about funding your PhD
You may be able to fund your postgraduate research with funding from your current employer or from industry.
You can borrow up to £26,445 for a PhD starting in 2022. Doctoral loans are not means tested and you can decide how much you want to borrow.
Find out about PhD loans on GOV.UK
You may be able to win funding from one or more charities to help fund your PhD.
We charge tuition fees for every year of study. If you’re applying for a fully funded project, your fees will be paid for you.
2022 to 2023 entry:
Subject | UK fees | International fees |
---|---|---|
Computer science full time | £4,596 | £24,600 |
Computer science part time | £2,298 | £12,300 |
Electronics and electrical engineering full time | £4,596 | £24,600 |
Electronics and electrical engineering part time | £2,298 | £12,300 |
Machine intelligence for nano-electronic devices and systems full time | £4,596 | £24,600 |
2023 to 2024 entry:
Subject | UK fees | International fees |
---|---|---|
Computer science full time | tbc | £25,500 |
Computer science part time | tbc | £12,750 |
Electronics and electrical engineering full time | tbc | £25,500 |
Electronics and electrical engineering part time | tbc | £12,750 |
Machine intelligence for nano-electronic devices and systems full time | tbc | £25,500 |
You're eligible for a 10% alumni discount on a self-funded PhD if you're a current student or graduate from the University of Southampton.
Our research takes place in a multidisciplinary, collaborative environment, organised across globally important research groups and national research centres.
The Centre for Flexible Electronics and E-Textiles (C-FLEET) is a centre of expertise for flexible smart materials, printed electronics and electronic textile technologies. We work with industry, policy makers, and the general public to address both national and global challenges.
Our research within the cyber physical systems (CPS) Group involves the exploration and development of theoretical foundations, modelling and programming languages, engineering methods, design tools and system engineering applications.
Researching technologies such as energy efficient power transmissions, satelite technology and renewable power generation for the 21st centrury.
Researching and devloping new methods of wireless technology.
We explore how to improve renewable energy sources and create more efficient electronic device technology to benefit the environment.
We develop and apply advances in IT technology, working with academic and industrial partners.
Our work covers a range of technological areas from control, to machine learning and computer vision.
We engage with the wider community to address some of the greatest economic and societal challenges facing the World Wide Web today.
We offer 2 doctoral routes:
If you decide to apply for an iPhD make sure you refer to the individual requirements and application deadlines through the relevant CDT:
If you choose our standard research PhD, decide whether to apply to an advertised research project or create your own proposal.
Whichever programme you choose, you'll need to identify a potential supervisor. Therefore it's a good idea to email supervisors working within your field of interest to discuss PhD projects. It's best to do this well ahead of the application deadline.
You’ll find supervisors’ contact details listed with the advertised project, or you can search for supervisors in the staff directory.
As part of your online application, you’ll need to send us:
If you are applying for the MINDS iPhD you'll also need to write a 2000 word research outline.
The application process is the same whether you're applying for a funded project, or have created a research proposal.
You should have a 2:1 honours undergraduate degree or equivalent qualification in a relevant discipline.
If English is not your first language, you'll need an IELTS minimum level of 6.5 with a 5.5 in writing, reading, speaking and listening.
If you are applying for the MINDS iPhD. you'll need an IELTS minimum level of 6.5 with a 6.0 in writing, reading, speaking and listening.
Your awarded certificate needs to be dated within the last 2 years.
If you need further English language tuition before starting your degree, you can apply for one of our pre-sessional English language courses.
Check the specific entry requirements listed on the project you’re interested in before you apply.
Research degrees have a minimum and maximum duration, known as the candidature. Your candidature ends when you submit your thesis.
Most candidatures are longer than the minimum period.
Degree type | Full time | Part time |
Computer science PhD | 2 to 4 years | 3 to 7 years |
Electronics and electrical engineering PhD | 2 to 4 years | 3 to 7 years |
Machine intelligence for nano-electronic devices and systems PhD | 2 to 4 years | Not available |