Curriculum And Laboratories In Electronics Manufacturing Processes At The University Of Arkansas

The University of Arkansas Electrical and Industrial Engineering Departments have developed a course in Electronics Manufacturing Processes. The course is part of a program designed for graduate and upper-level undergraduate students from any engineering discipline. It serves as a survey of electronics manufacturing with the objective of promoting concurrent engineering. This paper describes our approach with emphasis on the laboratory component in which interdisciplinary student teams perform CADICAM of printed wiring boards. The students perform design work on Sun workstations and mixed-technology automated assembly in an electronics assembly workcell incorporating robotics and vision technologies. Introduction It is no longer viable for engineers to remain narrowly focused in their individual disciplines. Increasingly, customers demand products of higher quality and lower cost; and there are both technical and competitive pressures to compress product development time. These trends necessitate the concurrent engineering approach, wherein engineers are able to cooperate in interdisciplinary teams to achieve the collective goal of economic success. The product and its manufacturing process must be designed concurrently, and engineers of all disciplines need better understanding of how their activities interact. Design engineers need to know the limitations of the production processes in order to design manufacturable products. Similarly, manufacturing engineers should be knowledgeable about emerging product technologies in order to plan and optimize the manufacturing process. The electronics industry needs engineering graduates who have a good understanding of both design and production, in order to accomplish the objectives of concurrent engineering. College engineering courses have long been available in product/process design and computer-aided design I computer-aided manufacturing (CADICAM) for the metal-working industries; however, no comparable course has been available for the electronics industry. The Departments of Electrical Engineering and Industrial Engineering at the University of Arkansas have addressed this need through initiation of a program in Electronics Manufacturing. The first stage in creation of this program has been development of a course in Electronics Manufacturing Processes. 0-7803-0755-082 $3.00 01992 IEEE 174 The objective of the course is to prepare engineers for entry-level participation in the team environment necessary for successful competition in the world electronics industry. The catalog description states that the course is an introduction to manufacturing processes and concurrent engineering in the electronics industry, providing a survey of electronics components and products and the processes of fabrication and assembly. Principles of design, productivity, quality and economics are presented, with an emphasis on manufacturability. The approach for this course has been consistent with a strategy over the last six years to provide curriculum and laboratory experiences in which the students gain hands-on experience with industrial-scale process equipment. With generous support from the AT&T Foundation, other industries and the State of Arkansas, we have developed state-of-the-art Materials Handling and Manufacturing Automation Laboratories. The laboratory component of the Electronics Manufacturing Processes course is conducted in the Manufacturing Automation Laboratory. Almost 100 students from electrical, industrial and computer-systems engineering have taken Electronics Manufacturing Processes since January 1991. The authors have developed a textbook and laboratory exercises to accompany the course. Previous papers [ 1,2 , 31 have described the concepts and curriculum. This paper focuses on the laboratory component that we believe is vital to the success and popularity of the course.