Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1315894
DECEMBER 2020 I DESIGN007 MAGAZINE 69 Shaughnessy: That's good to hear. They will have some EEs coming in with some manufacturing knowledge and vice versa. Vanderford: Right now, we're fortunate that Altium has been discounting us on our licenses. Once a year, we buy stu- dent licenses. Altium reduced the stu- dent lab fee from $100 a seat to $75 a seat, which is great. We tell the students all about AltiumLive too and say, "Look at all this" Once they see the vault of library files, they get excited. Shaughnessy: AltiumLive has some good keynotes and talks that are available for free online, even though the event is over. Your students could watch it anytime. Vanderford: That's cool. We love Altium. It's a fantastic program. For someone who is in the second or third year of the program, they real- ize it's complex. It has a lot of options, but it's one of those that we focus strongly on training. "Let's use this to design basic parts with this on here. Let's use this in relation to something that you can physically hold in your hands." Keeping it at the community college level cost is always a challenge. For instance, we teach PCB manufacturing with SMT compo- nents, and we teach the students how to build boards. Sometimes, it's a tape and reel of some 14-pin QFP chips or something like that, and that's hard to get at a discounted price. At the same time, we want to train them on how to program the pick-and-place so that it can pick up the parts with the correct pitch, the correct heights, and the correct tape and reel. We're very fortunate that we've had several of our advisory committee members donate expired products to us—companies like RBB, Valtronic, Vexos, and RW Beckett. These might include capacitors beyond their expira- tion limits in terms of their manufacturability or QFN parts from trays that can't be used any- more—any inventory that has been done for a while. We use those parts in our curriculum because they're similar to what's being used out in the industry. We have a lot of support from our advisors from that. Shaughnessy: Thanks, Johnny. Vanderford: Thank you. DESIGN007 To read the full interview go to the December 2020 issue of SMT007 Magazine. Lorain County Community College students have access to the MEMS lab during evening hours as well, minimizing conflicts with their current jobs. Workbenches with inspection equipment in a MEMS program lab space.