Interdisciplinary, multi-instructor graduate education in electronics packaging

The University of Arkansas established the interdisciplinary High Density Electronics Center (HiDEC) in 1991 to conduct research in advanced electronic packaging materials and technologies, with the primary focus being on thin film multichip module (MCM-D) packaging. To support this effort from an educational perspective, the offering of senior elective and graduate level courses in electronic packaging became necessary. Since an acceptable textbook was not available, ten faculty members from the University of Arkansas agreed to prepare discipline-specific material for the courses and to teach the portions of the courses for which they had prepared material. Using this approach, two senior/graduate courses were developed and taught by the ten faculty members during the 1994-95 academic year, and each academic year since then. Consequently, in these two courses, students from several engineering and basic science departments were subjected to technical subjects from a number of disciplines, each taught by a different instructor. Subsequent to the initial offering of the two courses, a decision was made to use the material which had been prepared for the two courses as the basis for a textbook on electronic packaging with emphasis on multichip modules. This paper discusses the organization of the two courses, the performance and comments of students who have completed the courses, the level of success of the courses as perceived by both the students and the instructors, and the contents and organizational philosophy of a textbook which resulted from the development of the two courses.