The semiconductor (S/C) manufacturing sector of the U.S. economy is growing rapidly. However, the ability to supply a well-trained workforce for this major economic sector is severely lagging the demand. Furthermore, as the technical and role demands for technicians increase, their core knowledge in the areas of statistics and unit-process operations increasingly overlaps that of engineers in an S/C plant. Conversely, new engineers, who may become responsible for technician oversight in a factory setting, need to better understand the job scope of technicians, as well as receive more hands-on training during their academic program. It is thus advantageous to cross-train S/C engineers and technicians in shared factory-like settings for selected equipment-intensive courses, without artificially forcing complete articulation between respective curricula. Such side-by-side training, broken into unit modules, decreases per-student lab costs, and thus training costs, while also facilitating: (1) cross-training of existing factory technicians and engineers, for lifelong learning, (2) cross-training of community college and university faculty, and (3) academic migration of technicians who later choose to pursue engineering careers. In this project, a consortium of three universities and three community college systems in three contiguous states, each having S/C manufacturing as an economic backdrop, is facilitating side-by-side training of technicians and engineers, bolstered by the development, utilization, and evaluation of computer-aided curriculum modules to be integrated into factory-like labs and related courses. These modules will cover S/C unit processes and their facility demands from both technician and engineering perspectives. The multimedia modules are being designed to function either independently or coupled to a multilevel manufacturing simulator package. They can serve training needs in real, mock, or virtual factory-like labs, or they can be used for assessment.
