What the GATE EC, EE and IN syllabi share

Electronics and Communication (EC), Electrical Engineering (EE) and Instrumentation (IN) sit next to each other in almost every student's shortlist, and the GATE 2027 brochure allows EC with EE and IN, EE with EC and IN, and IN with EC and EE as two-paper combinations — which is itself a signal that the organising institute expects the same candidates to be looking at all three. What none of the usual comparison pages will give you is the overlap as a fact rather than an impression. This page searches the three official syllabus PDFs for the same list of terms and prints the answer.

Source: GATE 2027 Information Brochure, p. 13, as on 23 September 2026

The shape of the three papers

IN declares 10 sections in about 1026 words, EE 10 in about 748, and EC 8 in about 639. All three open with Engineering Mathematics — which is not the same section in each paper — and all three carry a Control Systems section and a Signals and Systems section in some form. IN is the only one of the three with sections named Sensors and Industrial Instrumentation and Measurements; EE is the only one with Electrical Machines, Power Systems and Power Electronics; EC is the only one with Communications and Electromagnetics as declared sections.

Source: Official GATE 2027 syllabus PDFs (gate2027.iitm.ac.in), as on 23 September 2026

The declared sections of all three

Is the term named in that paper's syllabus?

The common spine

14 of the 20 terms above are named in all three documents: thevenin's theorem, norton's theorem, superposition theorem, laplace transform, fourier series or transform, z-transform, nyquist, bode plot, routh-hurwitz, root locus, state-space or state equations, operational amplifiers, complex variables or complex analysis and differential equations. Network theorems, transform methods, complex analysis and classical control are common ground across EC, EE and IN. If you are deciding between two of these papers in your second or third year, that spine is the part of your reading that is not at risk from the decision — and it is a larger part than the usual comparison implies.

Source: Official GATE 2027 syllabus PDFs (gate2027.iitm.ac.in), as on 23 September 2026

Where they part

Two terms are named in only two of the three: convolution in EC and IN but not EE, and the sampling theorem in EC and EE but not IN. Everything else that separates them belongs to IN alone — numerical methods, transducers or sensors, microprocessors or microcontrollers and neural networks are named in the Instrumentation syllabus and in neither of the other two. That is the clearest single statement of what makes Instrumentation its own paper, and note what it is not: it is not a mathematics difference. Note also what is absent from this list. Two claims often made about these papers, that the z-transform is missing from EE and that complex variables are missing from EC, are both false. EE prints “Laplace Transform and Z transform” in Signals and Systems; EC heads the same subject “Complex Analysis” where EE and IN head it “Complex Variables”.

Source: Official GATE 2027 syllabus PDFs (gate2027.iitm.ac.in), as on 23 September 2026

“Not named” is about the document

Source: Official GATE 2027 syllabus PDFs (gate2027.iitm.ac.in), as on 23 September 2026

The pairs the brochure allows

Table 4 on printed page 13 lists EC with CS, DA, EE, IN, PH and RA; EE with DA, EC, IN, PH and RA; and IN with BM, EC, EE, ME and RA. So EC+EE, EC+IN and EE+IN are each an allowed combination in GATE 2027. The brochure prints that table under the heading “Tentative, Subject to change”, and section 6.2 on printed page 11 calls it “the tentative list given in Table 4” — which is the brochure's own caution, not one added here.

Source: GATE 2027 Information Brochure, p. 13, as on 23 September 2026