What The BUILD Program does for your school

From the perspective of a school, The BUILD Program’s job is to make things easy for you. We will supply everything you need other than the building itself. Here are some of the things we supply to BUILD Program schools:

Infrastructure. You provide the space. We provide everything for that space.

  • Furniture (e.g., benches, chairs, whiteboards)

  • Fully stocked, well organized and labeled benches

  • Tools (e.g, soldering irons, screwdrivers, mills, lathes)

  • Test equipment (e.g., Oscilloscope, VNA)

  • Software (most of this will be FOSS)

  • Consumable supplies (e.g., solder, wick)

  • Project supplies (e.g., stock and parts)

  • Posters

  • Chamber kits

Course Materials

Your courses should be tailored to your local needs so that you are graduation people with the skills your employer needs. We provide an initial set of course materials which you can use as long as you like. You can also tune, develop, or co-develop tailored or fully custom course materials as describe here. This includes:

  • Agenda

  • Initial syllabi

  • Initial lesson plans

  • Initial course notes

  • Initial course presentations

  • Initial project descriptions

  • Your courses should be tailored to your local needs so that you are graduation people with the skills your employer needs. We provide an initial set of course materials which you can use as long as you like. You can also tune, develop, or co-develop tailored or fully custom course materials as describe here.

Working with the BUILD Program guidance and Train the trainer courses

  • Mentor training

  • Teacher training

  • Role Player training (CEOs, marketing, customers. manufacturers)

School Interface

Supply of project kits

Remote support for mentors (including other mentors)

Database management of submitted approved projects and course materials

Marketing

The fundamental problem lies in our educational approach where engineering disciplines are taught in isolation, perpetuating a mindset that mechanical engineers can tackle their challenges independently of those working with semiconductors. The reality is that contemporary problems demand collaborative solutions across disciplines like mechanics, electronics, materials, and software. Our undergraduate programs currently lack this holistic learning perspective, neglecting to foster a collaborative culture where students learn to work together to tackle complex challenges. We must promptly address this gap to ensure our engineering graduates are well-equipped for the demands of the modern world.

Let's discuss why chip designers need to work in multidisciplinary teams with, say, mechanical engineers. Chip design involves more than just working with wafers. The secret sauce also includes packaging, mounting, and thermodynamics (you need to get the heat away very, very efficiently with today's technologies). TSMC was not built by engineers siloed in their discipline, and we will not be able to do it that way either. We need a generation of engineers who are prepared to work in modern engineering teams.

We know how to create this workforce.

In December 2016, we co-developed a training program to prepare recent engineering graduates for work as members of fast-paced multidisciplinary engineering teams. Participants were government employees from a broad range of schools – elite private institutions like MIT, large state schools, and small rural schools (see our list of alumni from over 60 schools). We found that across the board the engineers had been well prepared by the schools to handle academic engineering work with a solid framework of fundamentals.

But they were not ready to work in modern engineering environments to actually design products practical for manufacture.

Summary: What’s in this for you?

What can you do as part of this program? What will you be able to do then that you can’t do now? You’ll be part of world class engineering teams who know how to get things done. Bringing a spark of an idea from models through prototypes to manufactured products is hard. It takes holistic approach that isn’t usually taught. You’re going to get it here.