9734349 Subbaryan The worldwide electronics market is expected to reach $1.2 trillion by the year 2001. The US electronics industry, with the highest worldwide revenue, has grown by leaps and bounds, surpassing the traditional manufacturing industries such as automobiles, chemicals and textiles. The electronics industry is increasingly the indicator of the nation's economic health and vitality. As the future electronic systems increase in complexity, incorporating high-speed digital data processing elements together with optical and/or microwave/mm wave communication elements, the need for system oriented integration will increase. This, according to the National Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors, will require an integrated simulation framework from IC to system for cost-effective design. Package design is expected to be a critical fimction of this framework, since package complexity is driven as much by systern-level application needs as by device technology. Many curricular reforms will also be necessary to ensure that future design engineers possess integrated, systern-level design skills. The priority, therefore, in curriculum reform is to instill synthesis skills and interdisciplinary, team-oriented problem-solving skills. In the present proposal, a design framework based on the methods of nonlinear optimization is developed for integrated, multidisciplinary design of electronic products. Although this framework is expected to be valid at all levels from system down to the device, its demonstration is based on two "real-life," commercially available electronic packages. This integrated optimization of the existing packages will be carried out in active collaboration with the manufacturers. The fundamental idea behind the design strategy is to partition the design problem at any level of hierarchy into three tasks and then to recursively ca-rryout these tasks starting at the system level. In the first task, adoptively accurate approximations to design functions in the electrical, mechanical, and thermal domains are built using artificial neural network models. These models are later used in the second task to decompose the overall op on problem into simpler subproblems. Strategies for overall optimization are considered in the last task. A broad range of educational activities that are closely tied to the above three design tasks are proposed. A sample of these activities at undergraduate level include demonstrations of modem concurrent engineering practice to freshmen, design space exploration using neural net function surfaces for juniors, and analysis of electronic packages by multidisciplinary teams of senior level students. At a graduate level, an electronics packaging certificate course for practicing engineers, a course on modeling of electronic packages, and an advanced optimal design class are planned. The integrated, multidisciplinary design strategy proposed here do not appear to have been considered for electronic systems in previous research. Clearly such novel strategies are critical for the continued success of the vitally important electronics industry. The activities proposed here enable the building of "virtual systems" for cost-effecfive design of future electronic products by multidisciplinary teams of engineers possessing strong synthesis skills. ***
