[smalley]

This seems like good marketing but reading this press release and looking at the courses in their degree program I feel like I'm missing what's different here (other than some reference to supply chain management).

Most of the coursework here seems to be very similar to what was available over a decade ago at the state university I attended for graduate school (my concentration was semiconductor device theory related). While I think this material is very interesting I don't know that the demand is going to be there for this type of field. Companies like Intel have dedicated smaller departments for process development which do the more academic work (for example the D1X facility).

My experience with fabrication organization is the need is much more process engineer and technician focused rather than semiconductor engineers. The high volume hires are in improving reliability, reducing cost etc. I don't think you really need the EE degree for this, more likely industrial engineering, chemical engineering or statistics.

This said, Purdue has always had a very strong program in the more device oriented semiconductor courses (Until his passing Robert Pierret the fellow who wrote some of the best and most used grad textbooks on devices called it home).

[avs733]

You are correct. This is clearly not the first…check out Rochester institute of technology…it’s just a branding exercise which is very in keeping with the current Purdue leadership.

[acoard]

Help me understand, are you saying this is purely smoke and mirrors or just nothing fundamentally new?

As a semiconductor lay-person, my expectation is that this course would really just be an organized curriculum around semiconductors, and if you completed it you'd be hopefully competitive getting a job at Intel/Qualcom/etc. I am not expecting them to be providing any fundamentally novel approaches to semiconductor theory or design. To me it makes sense that the same type of knowledge may have been at the graduate (or more advanced) level before.

So to my (ignorant, layperson) perspective, I see the value of this making semiconductor study more accessible. It's no longer something you have to do for a (for example) PhD, but rather a structured program that should lead to an increase in semiconductor experts.

Am I off base? When you say you feel like you are "missing what's different here", what would you expect? Is it typical for new academic physics programs to provide truly novel techniques?

[smalley]

Definitely not saying that its all smoke and mirrors. Purdue is a great school for a lot of semiconductor related topics and there are a number of scholars I respect who work there (I did not attend that university).

What I mean is just that the announcement seems to be more of a branding exercise than a fundamental shift in what's included in a degree program. If you look at what they describe as the curriculum for example: undergrad: https://engineering.purdue.edu/semiconductors/degrees grad: https://engineering.purdue.edu/online/programs/masters-degre... These types of courses are very common among most curriculum I've seen as are many of the things they're offering (e.g. have a design fabricated something universities have done through MOSIS for quite some time or time in a university research fab which many schools have also had.

The positioning in the article seems to be highlighting the growing need for fab-type engineers though and I think that's not quite a match for what's on offer here. If you want to do very fundamental semiconductor device work like designing new device types or fabrication techniques there are some jobs in this but they do typically require a graduate education likely a PhD and are much more limited. If the construction of new fabs is what they are saying drives the need for a bigger wider program what is actually needed isn't device designers and engineers its tool owners, process managers, technicians/operators etc.

In semiconductors I'd say things are divided kind of between 1. Front End Design (Digital+Architecture and Analog) where the better and more plentiful jobs are (with more in the digital side) 2. Backend (timing closure, placement and routing, final simulations etc) 3. Process Design <-- this is where you're doing everything from figuring out how to manufacture a device you designed, implementing new and novel structures, doing a lot more 'chemical' type work potentially for things like interconnects etc. There are far fewer of these jobs 4. Manufacturing <-- running the process of operating a fab, making sure things are fast, repeatable and smooth, testing the output products from process stages to chip sort and test etc. This is much more full of technicians and some supervising engineers.

If I was trying to make an analogy to more software like roles, the manufacturing + backend folks are people running the build process, the process designers are a small library designing team and the frontend design teams are the bulk of the folks using all of the above to implement chip designs. You can get into the analog and digital design side with an EE masters in VLSI from most programs.

The programs Purdue offers can definitely get you into any of these types of role depending on what you do or are interested in, but what they're talking about in this writeup doesn't seem like a fundamental shift. If the goal was something more industry focused I could see perhaps creating a bunch of new courses or co-ops focusing on more industrial concerns (DFT/DFM, process management, simulating for non-idealities etc). I don't see the curriculum being wildly different in a way that things wouldn't slot into the more traditional roles at all. I don't think this is a bad thing, I just think this announcement is a bit more on the marketing side letting people know this is available.

As far as the provide truly novel techniques, I think there are plenty of those being designed for various special purposes in universities. Sometimes these designs lead to interesting industrial applications but the thing that's usually an issue is that industry focus is on predictable, low cost and high yield. The type of research industry will do typically enables generational jumps in density or power improvements etc but until its really necessary they'll wait to adopt highly novel academic research and then spend time figuring out how to make things manufacturable.

The reality of getting a job in semicondutors though is most likely you're going to do something design/verification related, process work will come to you from your fabricator in the form of a PDK (process development kit) which will have all the parameters of the process and rules for manufacturing (and perhaps a good set of standard cells you can use for digital implementations with the initial parasitic extraction work done etc). Like any job its a little more standard in practice and bit less focused on the exotic stuff ;)