Facilities

Anne and Charles Duncan Hall was designed to allow for shared resources among engineering departments, facilitating multidisciplinary research and education.  Private offices, classroom, laboratories, lecture halls, an auditorium, conference rooms, and courtyards surround the atrium.  This proximity eases communication and fosters collaboration.  Departments, institutes, and centers in Duncan Hall include electrical and computer engineering, as well as computational and applied mathematics, statistics, and computer science, the Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology (K²I), and the Center for Multimedia Communication (CMC) which is situated in a dedicated Texas Instruments Wing.  The Abercrombie Building, located adjacent to Duncan Hall, houses part of electrical and computer engineering, as well as chemical engineering and civil and environmental engineering.

 

All research programs in the department use the extensive computing facilities available for education and research, including two state of the art clean rooms, an undergraduate lab, and a DSP "Elite" Lab.  Resources are on a local area network of heterogeneous machines running variations of UNIX operating systems, Windows, and various networking software.  The computational hardware available to our faculty and students includes the Rice Computational Research Cluster, a 3 TeraFLOP Cray XD1 Linux cluster, and the Rice Terascale Cluster, a 1 Teraflop HP Integrity Linux cluster. In addition the these large scale shared resources individual research groups and department have access to and manage various parallel machines and small clusters of workstations and PCs.

The ECE Department also has many design and simulation software packages available in the research and educational labs including Cadence, Mentor Graphics, Mathworks Matlab/Simulink, NI Labview, Synopsys, and Xilinx. The ECE senior capstone design sequence also uses the facilities of the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen (OEDK).


Facilities Directory (room - extension)