Electronics from the "Bottom Up": An Intel-NCN@Purdue initiative in nanoelectronics education
Category
Published on
Abstract
In the 1960’s, a group of leaders from industry and academia, the Semiconductor Electronics
Education Committee (SEEC), recognized that the age of vacuum tubes was ending, and that
engineers would have to be educated differently if they were to realize the opportunities that the
new field of microelectronics presented. SEEC eventually produced seven undergraduate
textbooks and four films and reshaped the teaching of electronics. Today, channel lengths have
shrunk by a factor of 100, microelectronics has become nanoelectronics, but we still teach
students very much as they were taught 30 years ago. Today, research on mesoscopic physics
and molecular electronics has given us a new understanding of nanoscale devices. New methods
to treat stochastic effects for problems in reliability, random dopant fluctuations, etc. are being
developed. The new knowledge emerging from research is still largely absent from the
semiconductor engineering curriculum. Is it time for a new SEEC initiative?