Hypermedia: a tool for teaching complex technologies

Present technological solutions tend to become very complex, interrelated and difficult to characterize systems, thereby giving rise to what we name "complex technologies". Complex technologies have a lot of related concepts comprising a large number of nonexcluding or excluding subconcepts. Complex technologies education is usually based on the analysis of specific devices from different manufacturers, but this method is not suitable because it provides only one particular insight. This situation demands a new methodology summarizing all the characteristics of a particular technology and making the dynamic link between related concepts possible. From this perspective, the authors' work describes an original method for the characterization of complex technologies and proposes the hypermedia technique as a suitable solution for its practical implementation. The method has been applied for teaching field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and monolithic digital integrated circuits (MDICs), which are complex technologies constituting two of the most dynamic areas of microelectronics.