Ja-beom Koo, assistant professor of electrical engineering, recently participated in the NORDTECH Workforce Development Summit held in Troy, NY. At the summit, he presented his research titled “Developing Microelectronics and VLSI Field Education for the Potential Workforce,” which was published in the 2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition. 

Reflecting on the event, Professor Koo noted that the summit was highly productive, providing opportunities to connect with fellow professors from universities across New York state, as well as representatives from the Department of Defense (DoD), National Science Foundation (NSF), and industry leaders such as GlobalFoundries and Micron. 

The NORDTECH consortium, which brings together universities, companies like IBM, Micron, GlobalFoundries, and NY CREATES, focuses on expanding regional microelectronics fabrication and workforce development. This summit highlighted the critical role of education and collaboration in advancing these goals. 

You can read more about his research here. 

Abstract 

The field of microelectronics lies at the heart of countless technological advancements and serves as catalyst for innovation across various industries. Recognizing its critical importance, the United States Congress passed the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022, which aims to bolster the nation’s position in microelectronics research, development, and manufacturing. In response to this transformative legislation, this paper is to describe the recent development in Electrical Engineering department at Cooper Union for innovating curriculum in microelectronics education. 
The primary objective of this development is to entice students into microelectronics and VLSI field and build up a cutting-edge, industry relevant curriculum by utilizing design kits provided by semiconductor manufacturing company. In addition, industry standard design software tools are provided. This paper describes detail about why it is important to have such environment in the microelectronics education. Detail contents about each class year curriculum are included and shows how they are related each other. The curriculum regarding microelectronics and VLSI consists of circuit analysis and microelectronics 1 for sophomore, microelectronics 2 and Analog VLSI for Junior, and Digital VLSI for Senior. One of uniqueness in curriculum is Junior project and Senior project. Every year from freshmen to senior, 2 credits project class should be completed, which are based on hands-on experiments. Junior project class has one session dedicated to implementing one of circuits on bread boards such as crystal oscillator and active mixer. Students can find any issues or challenges through experiments, which are not found through theory based class. Although students have learned those issues through previous courses, they can recognize clearly by experiments. This hands-on experiments must lead to strong motivation to in-depth research and necessity of on-chip implementation. Senior project, therefore, supports teams for IC design by tape-out process so that senior students can design their own chips.