Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1093246
14 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I MARCH 2019 Shaughnessy: That's a good sign. Spivey: Yes. TZ Medical is another local company that's almost full of GFU students. One of their engineers who is now the CEO hired one of our grads as the second engineer. Now, they have 10–12 engineers, and they're almost all GFU grads. Johnson: I've been to your facility and seen your lab. Could you give us a verbal tour of the lab facilities you have for students? Spivey: For the first few years, we started off with a perfboard in the first year, but we moved to doing PCBs. We used to use Electronics Workbench Tools, but I had students graduate and tell me, "You need Altium." So, we got Altium back and have been using it for years now. We would have the boards fabricated. In the early 2000s, we were doing through-hole stuff as much as possible, so we learned how to do the hotplate method. Then, we learned about getting the tem- plates from Pololu for the laser-cut Mylar. A couple of years ago, we acquired the old cafe- teria at the engineering school, and now that's a 15,000 square-foot maker hub. We have a machine shop, wood shop, welding area, a prototype lab full of 3D printers and laser cut - ters, sewing machines, computer lab, meeting rooms, etc. We also have a PCB lab in there. Now, we have Voltera PCB printers, which we use mostly for getting boards back from fabricators and printing the solder paste on them; they work very well for that. We also have an LPKF pick- and-place machine and reflow oven. We just added a microscopic camera as well, so we can look at the joints while we're soldering. We've also added some new rework tools for inevi- table student mistakes. Johnson: How do you see your program and industry professionals working together? Johnson: How long have you been doing PCBs in the lab? Spivey: Around 13–14 years. Johnson: How does that translate into employ- ability for your alumni? Spivey: We have close to 100% employment. Shaughnessy: I saw the list of companies where your graduates have gone, and it's an impres- sive list with names like Intel, Boeing, etc. Spivey: Tektronix has been a big destination for our students. They wouldn't hire from us 8–10 years ago. Then, they finally got one of our students in their embedded design group, and he won the presidential award that year. They hired another one of our students, and he also received their presidential award. After that, they hired another one of our students who got the presidential award again. They kind of quit giving it to that unit, but since then, they've been raiding us pretty heavily. We have students at a number of other places around as well, including Rockwell, Teradyne, A-Dec, Intel, and many more. The engineering lab at GFU features some of the latest PCB equipment.