Grant Title

ATCARET - Arizona-Texas Consortium for Alternative and Renewable Energy Technologies

Sponsor

NSF - National Science Foundation

Partner Institution

Arizona State University - East, Austin Community College, Pima Community College

Global warming, pollution, and expensive and politically unstable sources of energy show the need for alternative and renewable sources of energy. State legislatures across the USA are now mandating the use of alternative energy sources. As this field grows, there will be an increasing demand for electronics technicians who are familiar with these technologies.

The Electronics faculty at MCC along with ASU, Austin CC, and Pima CC have recognized this need and proposed and won an NSF grant to develop an online curriculum in alternative energy for national dissemination in programs that do not have this expertise.

MCC Electronics is developing two online courses under this grant:

• Alternative Energy Sources
• Energy Conversion and Applications

We are currently in the first year of this three-year grant.

ATCARET web site

MCC Press Release

ASU Press Release

Renewable Energy Access

Arizona Republic Article

MTF - MICROELECTRONICS TEACHING FACTORY

NSF - National Science Foundation

Arizona State University - East

Circa 2001, Intel decommissioned Fab 6 here in Tempe, and attempted to donate a complete set of fab equipment to MCC to aid us in educating MT's for Intel. (MCC is the largest Electronics Technology program in the area.) Unfortunately, due to space limitations on our campus, we were unable to accept this generous donation. There was space at the ASU-East campus (20 miles east of MCC), so the fab was placed there, with the agreement that MCC would have access to this facility.

ASU made a substantial investment and did a splendid job getting the fab up and running, and MCC students often take advantage of this fab in MCC courses such as GTC110 - Semiconductor Processing.

Developing and disseminating curricula for a facility like this is a big job. The NSF funded a large portion of it. MCC Electronics faculty participated by developing the MTF Curriculum Delivery System for this facility. This Curriculum Delivery System is a complex web site that allows students and faculty to navigate through thousands of pages of manuals, lab exercises, exams, and performance assessments for this facility.

We also developed an embedded microcontroller based custom Mass Flow Controller (MFC) monitor for use in the MTF curriculum lab exercises.

SEMICONDUCTOR MANUFACTURING CURRICULUM

NSF - National Science Foundation

MATEC - Maricopa Advanced Technology Education Center

When the boom in the semiconductor industry was first beginning, there was an urgent need to get electronics faculty up to speed on these technologies as quickly as possible. Unlike the MCC Electronics program, many electronics programs did not have faculty with expertise in this area.

To help solve this problem, the NSF funded development of a large, comprehensive set of instructional modules in semiconductor manufacturing to aid faculty. MCC Electronics faculty developed several of these instructional modules for national dissemination.

NSF - National Science Foundation

MATEC - Maricopa Advanced Technology Education Center

Recognizing that electronics technology programs in many parts of the country are not up-to-date with the latest technolgies, the NSF issued a grant to develop curriculum in state-of-the-art technologies that are not yet covered in most ET programs or textbooks. The faculty of MCC Electronics were employed to develop lab exercises for this program. We developed the following lab exercises:

• Switching Power Supplies,
• Digital Signal Processing (DSP), and
• USB Data Acquisition.

For more information about Work-Ready Electronics, take a look at the Work-Ready Electronics (WRE) web site.

Read the Press Release. | (local copy)