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Professor Paul Svasta is with Politehnica University of Bucharest, Romania, Faculty of Electronics, Telecommunication and Information Technology and is head of the Center for Electronics Technology and Interconnection Techniques (CETTI). He is also a driving force for change and growth in Romania’s small but vibrant electronics industry.
In 1989, Professor Svasta formulated a vision for Romania’s future participation in the global electronics industry following the collapse of communism is his country. He surmised that it might be too late to catch the West and Asia in terms of production of hardware, but he knew that there would always be an increasing need for talented electronic product designers.
He thus set about the task of pulling together professors from other universities in Romania to cooperate in the development of opportunities for their students through a joint collaboration with industry in a forum where academicians, industry engineers and engineering students could teach and learn from each other and demonstrate their growing and improving capabilities. That forum they named TIE (Interconnection Techniques in Electronics) and late this April was held the 25th edition of the annual event.
The event included lectures from both universities and industry representatives of largely Romanian based companies from other EU nations and the US. The event included an informative panel discussion co-chaired by Professor Dan Pitica (Technical University of Cluj-Napoca), and Hartmut Hohaus (general manager of Miele Tehnica srl). The topic of discussion at this year’s event was titled “Partnership in Practice” and underscored the importance of an ongoing partnership between university and industry and the many mutual benefits each receives from their interaction.
Many of the other technical presentations were focused on matters related to PCB design and it was fitting as the high point of the event was a competition among the students to design and layout a circuit for a specific product from a prospective bill of materials provided and meeting to the maximum extent possible a long list of design and product requirements. The students had just four hours to deliver a design which was then evaluated by a team comprised of a university instructor and a seasoned industry engineer against a checklist of specific design requirements.
To read this entire article, which appeared in the May 2016 issue of The PCB Design Magazine, click here.
