Globalisation of packaging research, education and further training

“Globalization of industries and markets” are well known phrases describing today strategic demands in economy. Especially large scale enterprises solve their research, development and production tasks with distributed resources all over the world, using the modern technical possibilities of communication. But also smaller enterprises more and more have to operate global, at least offering and selling their products or services on the market. These demands are particularly pronounced in the area of high-tech-technologies like semiconductor industry, packaging and whole electronics manufacturing. In correlation with that ways and methods of education and further training, e.g. at universities, that face this challenge have to be installed. The first part of the paper will describe the experiences at Electronics Technology Lab of Dresden University of Technology in the field of packaging education and further training. The Center of Microtechnical Manufacturing, a sub-unit of ETL which is focused on further training, services and research in the field of manufacturing electronics, will be presented. Examples of the activities at CMM will be shown and some experiences out of four years of successful work will be discussed. It can be stated, that CMM is a well working institution of know-how-exchange between government supported research projects and interested persons and enterprises all over Germany. The three columns of CMMs work: further training, services and research work; will be presented. Also the influence of CMMs work on engineering curricula at Dresden University of Technology will be discussed. Second part of the presentation will show, based on the above mentioned background, a model of a collaborating project between a US-enterprise, a US-university and CMM