Page 42 - Chip Scale Review_July August_2023-digital

A d v a n c i ng i n d i v i d u a l c o r e
technologies by faculty and students.
Very much like other universities, we
focused on advancing core technologies.
However, we placed the focus on next-
generation strategic technologies for the
industry. We identified and developed 12
core strategic technologies.
Integration of core technology
advances into sub-system prototypes.
We refer to sub-system prototypes
as design and demonstrate (D&D)
system prototypes—these prototypes
integrate advances in each of the 12 core
technologies, using pilot line facilities.
Typical universities cannot achieve this
level of integration. The reasons for this
are many and include faculty expertise in
one discipline, lack of pilot line facilities,
lack of program management experience,
and a lack of motivation for industry
projects. Faculty, typically, are single-
disciplined and within that they are
experts in one area, but with phenomenal Figure 1: Two parts to R&D: academic and industry.
depth. A leading-edge system prototype
requires knowledge in many, many areas
in electrical, mechanical, chemical and
materials engineering.
We addressed the challenges noted
above by creating a global industry
consortium consisting of all supply-
ch a i n c o m p a n ie s f r o m u s e r s t o
developers to material, process, and
tool manufacturing companies, and
users. Each of these companies paid
a membership fee and, in addition,
assigned one or more of their engineers
to work with Georgia Tech PRC either
on campus or off campus for up to three
years. GT PRC quickly learned the need
for industry-like system-level engineers,
just like in manufacturing companies,
to work as the program managers to
manage D&D prototypes. Such program
managers take advances developed
by faculty and students, and then by
using on-campus industry engineers as
project managers, they develop synergy
with other global industry partners.
The D&Ds, therefore, included not
only faculty and their students, but
also industry engineers and full-time
research faculty. Figure 1 conveys this
two-part strategy.

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