Industry-academia collaboration in undergraduate test engineering unit development

There is a permanent shortage of qualified test engineers in the electronic industry and R&D organizations, thus leading to a high demand for such staff. Addressing the issue, leading electronic companies have started to cooperate closely with universities in the area of training future test and failure analysis engineering specialists. Malaysia is a home of large semiconductor fabrication facilities representing a number of major multi-national corporations. Freescale Semiconductor Malaysia is among the largest IC fabrication companies in the country. Responding to the needs of the semiconductor sector, Monash University Malaysia and Freescale Semiconductor have jointly developed and implemented an undergraduate unit (subject) on Electronic Test Technology. The unit is available to the 4th year students of BE degrees in Electrical and Computer Systems Engineering and Mechatronics. The successful collaboration between the university and company covers also a number of other areas such as industrial attachments and final year (graduate) project development at Freescale Semiconductor with joint company-university supervision, joint postgraduate supervision, participation in industry-academia advisory committees, joint research publications and presentations, organising seminars and conferences, etc.