On May 9, 2017, at Purdue, West Lafayette, NEEDS held a forum on graduate education in electronic materials, devices, and systems. Industry partners (Intel, TI, Western Digital, Analog Devices, NXP, Synopsys, etc.) and university partners from Berkeley, MIT, Stanford also participated.

The specific topic for discussion was how graduate and continuing education should be re-shaped for a new era of electronics.

NEEDS (Nano-Engineered Electronic Device Simulation) is charged to advance electronics science and connect it to applications. NEEDS is a five-year initiative funded by the National Science Foundation and the Semiconductor Research Corporation consisting of teams at MIT, U.C. Berkeley, Stanford, and Purdue. Their goal was to create infrastructure to support end-to-end research and to bring the “simulate-model-design” paradigm that has been so successful in traditional electronics to new fields. Because of the short timeframe, they took a very focused approach centered on deeply physical compact models. These kinds of models connect fundamental research to applications. NEEDS has also created a comprehensive, online resource – a set of models, best practices and processes supported by a suite of tools and educational resources. NEEDS research advanced the science of nanodevices and integrated nanosystems while guiding the development of this infrastructure and benefiting from it.