from my observations i think its also the sad effect of lower budgets going to labs

the schools realise they can save money if they go more theory and less practice

which makes students more fearful of hands on

which then has a cyclical effect

iterate that machine a few times, and you no longer have as many lab-oriented demonstrators, which means the next generation of students get less lab training

etc etc

and then a mindset develops where you don't even need to do much hands on

as one of my favourite professors used to say "In theory, theory and practice are the same thing. In practice they're not"

Having taught some labs, it certainly is a bit tricky - my university focused on IC design centric analog. I'm still not 100% sold on that philosophy, but it sure is a lot harder to translate that into a lab.

those "labs" i saw were just cadence sessions

its sad almost noone has the budget to tapeout and probe in those subjects 1-2 a year

A major benefit of IC design is that the simulations and calculations match reality much better. The down side is that most students don't go into IC design, so it's not great for preparing you for a "typical" job.

hehe yeah

@antimony The junior-level lab that I worked on taped-out chips. It took a lot of effort to go from zero to minimum competence in IC design, tapeout, and testing in 2 semesters.

wow that is awesome!

did they get to measure too?

that was the plan, it usually worked out that they could test something

heheh nice :)

thats really cool

do you mind if i ask which continent that was, and which process?

We had a volcano in Iceland delay the FedEx shipment one year, causing us to miss getting chips back in time. Testing happened like 1-2 weeks before finals by plan.

ahh i remember that volcano

North America (US), and we fabricated on AMS and TSMC while I was there

nice!

It took a ton of work to make it work "behind the scenes"

ahh what kind of stuff?

Extra lab sessions for the students to teach them how to use the tools, bounding the design problems so that they were within the lesson plans, chip integration and final tapeout, bonding diagrams and final test plans so that the students could demonstrate their circuits

ohh geeze, yeh thats alot to push onto the teachers

could you script integration, drc and tapeout?

not really, not the way we did it.

ooof

yeah, how many students / year?

I think 40-60 students in groups of 3-5.

oh man, yeah thats alot of work

who did the bonding?

We used the MOSIS service for the MPW submission, and we contracted MOSIS to bond the parts into DIP-40 packages

ahhh nice

to your knowledge is that subject still going basically that way, ie. tapeout & measure?

The last time I heard, it was... but it's expensive and the schedule demands are pretty hard.

(for some value of expensive)

yeah honestly that budget is unheard of here lately alas

previously things were different, like 10 years ago

Honestly, with the rising cost of education, I would be disappointed if it didn't happen any more.

exactly

But getting back to the teaching philosophy, our goal was to have students understand why they were making design decisions. Many circuit designs you can "guess" your way into a working solution - and that's not designing a circuit anymore.

Many circuit topologies also behave poorly with the "guess and check" method - they fail to work outside a relatively narrow set of parameters.

So you get the teacher push-back of "are you sure this is the right value?"... and lab preparation designed to reduce wasting time in the lab.

One thing I didn't like about our curriculum is that you only had access to lab facilities for the 3 hours during the scheduled lab. I was good at building circuits, so I always did that when I was a student. Building circuits incorrectly was the typical reason students stayed late.

yeah no kidding

i was lucky we could use a lab anytime as long as there wasn't a class running

except the specialty labs ofc

and all UGs had after hours access too

we could and did stay super late at night, even working in personal projects

If I wanted to try for something close to a Socratic method (e.g. leading students to understand why the circuit wasn't working), then I had to be really on top of it and notice when students were messing up.

Otherwise I had family time constraints that kept me from staying too late with students.

General student access to (electronics) lab facilities was one thing I advocated for constantly...

ahh yeah

yep, totally

yeah you sound like me, always happy to put in extra effort to help the students

partly cos honestly, it is fun and heartwarming. and also since i felt the students had a bit of a raw deal in terms of what they were paying vs what they were getting back