The PEL is associated with the Department of Electronics and Telecommunications (DETEL) of the Faculty of Engineering (FEN) of UERJ. The Department of Electronics was created in 1981, as an offshoot of the Department of Electrical Engineering, to support the growth of the Electronic Engineering course, which had been created in 1974. In 1998, the Department was renamed as Department of Electronics and Telecommunications, offering in the curriculum of its undergraduate courses the emphases on Electronic Systems and Telecommunications, forming dozens of Engineers per year.
The PEL Academic Master’s Course was created in 2005 and recognized by CAPES that same year. Four subareas were originally created: 1) Optical Communications, 2) Computer Networks and Distributed Systems, 3) Control and Automation and 4) Intelligent Systems. At the end of 2012, the Signals and Communications Systems subarea was created. A few years later, this line of research incorporated the Optical Communications subarea.