Engineering Professional Associations

  New-generation Faculty Leaders Aim to Transform Indian Design, Semiconductor, Packaging, and Systems (IDSPS) with Next-Gen R&D and Workforce Initiative. The three-way partnership between Meity, academia, and industry created IDSPS as a national R&D and workforce program with 80 faculty from 30 Institutions and 80 global companies. Together, they made outstanding progress. They are ready to form industry consortiums in 12 industry centers to build the nation, educate 2000 Ph. Ds, 3000 MTech, 3000 BTech, and reeducate 15,000 industry engineers, as described below. 1. System Designs and Architectures by Profs. Kumar (IITJ) & Sharma (IIT Ropar) focuses on high-bandwidth computing, power efficiency, privacy, and security, as well as design for signal, power, EMI, and ESD. 2. CMOS Devices by Profs. Mohapatra (IITGN) & Dixit (IITD) focuses on the next-gen (< 3nm) semiconductor materials, process modeling, and characterization of logic and memory devices. Power Devices by Profs. Akshay K (IIT BBS) & Brag (IITG) focuses on device modeling, simulation and design, substrate and epi growth, device fabrication and characterization.  3. Package Substrates by Profs. Dixit (IITB) &Arora (IITJ) focuses on glass substrates with advances in package design, embedded components, large panel lithography, and polymer-Cu RDL  4. Co-packaged Optics by Profs. Emani (IITH) & Sudharsanan (ITTM) focuses on design of co-packaged optics for higher bandwidth at lower power than electronic packages, photonic interconnections, hybrid bonding assembly, and fiber coupling.  5. Predictive Modeling & Design by Profs. Agarwal (IITGN)& Roy (IITKGP) focuses on AI- assisted design for reliability, multi-physics design, materials, interfaces and stress development.  6. 6G Integrated Systems by Profs. Mandal (IITKGP), Duttagupta (IITB)& Kumar (IITG) focuses on low-loss glass substrates with embedded devices, components, and package-integrated antennas.  7. Integrated Sensors & MEMS by Profs. Mitra (IITD)& KP Rao (BITS) focus on new concepts in inertial sensors, resonators, printed sensors,2D materials, and sensor fusion.  8 Materials for Devices, Components & Packaging by Profs. Bhagwati on non-volatile memory, Kumar(IISc) on package materials & Murali (NIT Calicut) on components.  9. IC and Board Assembly by Profs. Badwe (IITK) & Govind Singh (IITH) focuses on Cu-Cu bonding, sintered Cu die-attach and fiber coupling assembly.  10. Thermal Technologies by Profs. Bhattacharya(IITKGP) &Ambirajan(IISc) focuses on liquid cold plates, 2-phase and boiling heat transfer, and thermal interfaces.  11. Integrated Power Electronics by Profs. Shiladri(ITB) & Yadav(IITR) focuses on integrated power modules with advances in system design, power devices, components, sintered-Cu die attach, and double-side liquid cooling.   12. System Electrical Test by Profs. Tudu (IIT TP) & Ahlawat (IIT Jammu) focuses on test advances in chiplets, 2.5D glass packages, boundary scan, analog and mixed signal.

📣 Update on NERC EMT Modeling Requirements Revisions The North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) Project 2022-04 team recently provided an update on their standards revision efforts related to electromagnetic transient (#EMT) modeling and studies. The draft FAC-002-5 revisions include the following: ⚡ Each TP and PC must have specific EMT modeling requirements including a documented process for collecting models and the necessary documentation to support EMT model review. ⚡ Each TP and PC must also establish and maintain a process to determine the necessity of various studies for evaluating reliability impacts (i.e., when and where to use certain model types. ⚡ Each GO (or TO) must provide EMT models following the established modeling requirements set by the TP and PC. ⚡ Each GO (or TO) must also issue a final attestation stating that the EMT models studied match the control modes, settings, protections, and performance of the installed equipment; including a report demonstrating that testing or monitoring matches EMT model response. ⚡ Each TP and PC must review the EMT models submitted to verify that they meet the requirements set forth. ⏱️ The proposed implementation plan is 24 months after the effective date of the future standard. 🗺️ The team is planning to request authorization from the #NERC Standards Committee (SC) to post the draft standard and implementation plan on July 16. A 45-day formal comment period would then follow through Sept 11. The ballot pools form through September 1. Reach out to the Elevate Energy Consulting + GridStrong team with any questions! 🔸 Following and understanding the NERC process, requirements, implementation timelines, etc. (TPs, PCs, GOs and TOs) 🔸 Enhancing modeling requirements across simulation domains to create a standard modeling package. (TPs, PCs) 🔸 Effectively meeting modeling requirements for new interconnection projects, and how to leverage advanced modeling and simulation tools and automations to streamline these efforts (GOs)

Communities are the secret sauce of your innovation and transformation efforts. But first, what are some tried-and-tested methods and tools to enable innovation? The good folks at States of Change and Nesta compiled lots of innovation methods and approaches into one overview structured into four spaces: 🧠 Intelligence Space—Helps you make sense of and conceptualise reality 🧪 Solution Space—Helps you test and develop solutions 🤖 Technology Space—Helps you enable action and change through tech 👯 Talent Space—Helps you mobilise talent to make change happen The tendency is to focus on methods, frameworks, and tech first. But here's the catch: Great tools, teach, and frameworks (think Design Thinking, Innovation Sprints, AR/ VR) are empty boxes without skilled, engaged, and empowered people to use them. 🫣 When you mobilise your internal talent through communities, learning networks, co-creation, action learning, and adaptive leadership, you unlock the full potential of the solution space. Why? Because solutions created with communities (rather than for them) are adopted faster and are more likely to withstand the test of time. 🔥 👩🔬 If you want to embed innovation into your organization, you must make it a habit, not a one-time event. Communities create safer spaces for sharing ideas, experimentation, prototyping, and iteration. They allow you to test solutions quickly with buy-in from the people they impact. This ensures that whatever solution you roll out is relevant and anchored in "their daily reality." 🤝 Communities bring accountability, collective ownership, and resilience to innovation. This ensures the diversity of voices involved in the process, which usually leads to new insights. Knowledge is being shared faster across departments, and bottom-up approaches foster engagement and that resourceful "can do" attitude. When you place your bet on people, you’re not just accelerating innovation. You’re also creating a system where results stick. Who in my network is involved in any shape or form with innovation and transformation projects in 2025? 👀

ICYMI: The Disordered Rock Salt (DRX) Consortium, led by Berkeley Lab is focused on making DRX cathodes made of manganese or titanium, which are both more abundant and cheaper than nickel or cobalt. Lithium #batteries made with DRX cathodes could safeguard the automobile industry and therefore consumers from higher prices spurred by supply constraints. Formed in fall 2022, the Consortium has a goal of demonstrating commercial-ready DRX cathodes in less than 5 years. 50 scientists aim to develop DRX battery cathodes that could perform just as well if not better than the NMC (nickel-manganese-cobalt) cathodes used in today’s lithium-ion batteries. Researchers at the Department of Energy’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) will help the team narrow down the best combination of manganese and titanium through computer modeling. Researchers from Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Argonne National Laboratory will work on chemical synthesis and scale up the materials for industry. New DRX-compatible electrolytes will be developed at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. And researchers from Berkeley Lab’s Molecular Foundry, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, and UC Santa Barbara will assist with materials characterization. #CriticalMinerals #innovation🔋🇺🇲 https://lnkd.in/eKmCRgRx

Time for some new paper! Is it good or bad (in terms of inventive and innovative performance) for a firm to join a consortium that includes a top R&D investor (aka, a big / #superstar #firm)? Well: in our latest work, Sara Amoroso (the real brain behind all this) and I find something intriguing: if you do, you will experience a #tradeoff, with higher chances to win a bid, but lower output afterwards. Why so? We advance several theories that can rationalise the findings, but overall it's a matter of #power imbalance in #collaborative #innovation! While this work is focusing on the nature and structure of #knowledge #spillovers and #transfer, it has #competition #policy implications: maybe teaming up with the big ones is not always the best thing to do, both for a firm and for societal welfare? Here's the abstract and you find the working paper version here https://lnkd.in/e_wQYadg as a GREDEG-CNRS, Université Côte d'Azur CNRS Côte d'Azur, and attached. Thanks Patrice Bougette for adding it to the series. This is a long-standing work, and you might have seen it appearing several years ago, but it has now been revised and improved! ----- The participation of top R&D investors in publicly funded research collaborations is a common, yet largely unexplored phenomenon. It creates opportunities for knowledge spillovers and may increase the chance for a project to be funded. At the same time, the unbalanced nature of such partnerships could exacerbate power asymmetries and hinder the overall performance of such collaborations. In this paper, we examine whether cooperating with top R&D companies affects the innovative performance of publicly funded research consortia. We build a fit-for-purpose dataset that matches information from the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) on R&D collaborative projects and proposals with data on the world's top 2,500 companies with the highest R&D investment (R&D Scoreboard). Accounting for both sample selection and endogeneity in the participation of top R&D investors in a two-part count model framework, we find that teaming up with leading R&D companies increases the probability of obtaining funds. However, this comes at the cost of hindering the innovative performance of the funded projects, both in terms of patents and publications. In light of this evidence, the tradeoffs of mobilizing top R&D players should be carefully leveraged in the evaluation and design of innovation policies aimed at R&D collaboration and technology diffusion. Frédéric Marty Tommaso Valletti Tomaso Duso Université Côte d'Azur EUR Economie et Management - ELMI

What tech is the Medical Technology Enterprise Consortium (MTEC) focused on? The Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) is accelerating military and medical (MILMED) R&D through innovative consortia like MTEC, a public-private partnership driving dual-use medical technologies for both military and civilian impact. MTEC brings together the Army, Navy, DTRA, and other federal entities to fund and fast-track solutions that address the most urgent operational and clinical medicine challenges. MTEC helps to bridge the gap from prototype to field deployment, with pathways for commercial market expansion. What capabilities and topics are federal sponsors prioritizing through MTEC? Here’s a snapshot based on recent and ongoing solicitations: • 𝗖𝗼𝗺𝗯𝗮𝘁 𝗖𝗮𝘀𝘂𝗮𝗹𝘁𝘆 𝗖𝗮𝗿𝗲 - Technologies to reduce fatality rates, improve battlefield treatment, and minimize the medical footprint (e.g., advanced wound care, biologics, pharmaceuticals, and point-of-injury devices).    • 𝗜𝗻𝗳𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝘂𝘀 𝗗𝗶𝘀𝗲𝗮𝘀𝗲 - Rapid vaccine and drug development, diagnostics, and countermeasures for emerging threats.    • 𝗘𝘅𝗽𝗲𝗱𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗿𝘆 & 𝗢𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗹 𝗠𝗲𝗱𝗶𝗰𝗶𝗻𝗲 - Mobile medical command and control, expeditionary medicine modernization, and solutions for care delivery in austere environments.    • 𝗣𝘀𝘆𝗰𝗵𝗼𝗹𝗼𝗴𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝗛𝗲𝗮𝗹𝘁𝗵 & 𝗥𝗲𝘀𝗶𝗹𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 - Predictive models and interventions for PTSD, stress, and mental health in military populations.    • 𝗣𝗵𝗮𝗿𝗺𝗮𝗰𝗼𝗴𝗲𝗻𝗼𝗺𝗶𝗰𝘀 & 𝗣𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗹𝗶𝘇𝗲𝗱 𝗠𝗲𝗱𝗶𝗰𝗶𝗻𝗲 - Implementing pharmacogenomic testing and individualized approaches to optimize warfighter readiness and reduce adverse reactions.    • 𝗥𝗲𝗴𝗲𝗻𝗲𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 & 𝗥𝗲𝗵𝗮𝗯𝗶𝗹𝗶𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗠𝗲𝗱𝗶𝗰𝗶𝗻𝗲 - Stem cell therapies, tissue engineering, and advanced prosthetics to restore function after severe injuries.    • 𝗠𝗲𝗱𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝗦𝗶𝗺𝘂𝗹𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 & 𝗛𝗲𝗮𝗹𝘁𝗵 𝗜𝗻𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗺𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗰𝘀 - Simulation-based training, digital health, mobile health, and decision support tools to increase patient safety and care quality.    • 𝗔𝗱𝘃𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗲𝗱 𝗠𝗲𝗱𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝗗𝗲𝘃𝗶𝗰𝗲𝘀 & 𝗗𝗶𝗴𝗶𝘁𝗮𝗹 𝗛𝗲𝗮𝗹𝘁𝗵 - Robotics for casualty rescue, nanotechnology, advanced imaging, software as a medical device (SaMD), and telemedicine platforms. How can you get involved or stay ahead of the curve in MILMED R&D? 1. Stay up to date on all things MILMED R&D. Join our MILMED Connect Funding Insider newsletter >> Link in the comments. 2. Explore MTEC’s Innovator Directory and Technology Showcase to see funded projects and partnership opportunities. MTEC's fast-track Other Transaction Authority (OTA) model enables rapid funding and collaboration, helping innovators bring solutions from lab to field and beyond. Let me know in the comments - which MILMED tech area do you think will have the biggest dual-use impact in the next 5 years?

Standards Committees Don’t Just Shape the Future, They Also Argue About It. A Lot. The way different standards organizations think about their final product fascinates me. 🔹 Treaty-based orgs (ISO, ITU-T) focus on agreement among nation-states, not necessarily the best technical solution. 🔹 Open standards orgs (IETF, W3C) prioritize technical soundness and aim for rough consensus. And then there’s the reality of politics. One of the work items in my area has reached an… interesting point: ✅ Technically sound? Yep, there’s rough consensus. ❌ Accepted by the community? Not so much, because people don’t like who developed it. If big tech dominates a solution, does the quality of the tech even matter? Or is the legitimacy of the process just as important? I lean toward technical quality over who wrote the spec, but I also respect the other point of view. So… is there a middle path here? Can we create standards that are both technically excellent and widely accepted? #IdentityStandards #IETF #W3C #ISO #DigitalIdentity #TechGovernance

How can engineering teams maintain autonomy when they are collaborating with many other teams on a complex system? There has been a rising answer to this problem in the non-software world: Model-Based Systems Engineering. The old way is the document-based approach: many documents are generated by different teams to capture the system's design from various stakeholder views, such as software, hardware, safety, manufacturing, etc. Every time one stakeholder changes a requirement in one document, it requires every other team to synchronise and manually update their documents. This makes every change slow and makes the whole job frustrating, as teams spend most of their time dealing with other teams' changes rather than thinking about the best technical solutions. The digital-modeling approach of Model-Based Systems Engineering creates a single source of truth for the system on which every team can autonomously contribute, while technology enables seamless synchronisation. The best implementation I have seen of this is at Jimmy, where Antoine Guyot, Mathilde Grivet and Charles Azam are building micro nuclear reactors to decarbonise industrial heat. Their whole system is modeled using Python and all the changes are synchronised using Github. This allows them to make multiple changes a day and even automate the verification of engineering and regulatory requirements. The result: a big update in their design takes them days instead of the many months expected in their industry. The result is much safer, thanks to the automated checks and the lack of copy-pasting errors. And the teams can focus on the value, creating ingenious technology to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This is the idea we tried to capture with the Tech-Enabled Network of Teams principle in The Lean Tech Manifesto: leveraging tech innovation to reduce the need for coordination between teams and increase autonomy at scale. #LeanTech #TechEnabledNetworkOfTeams

Navigating Excellence: How ISO/TC 176 Guides the Development of ISO Management Standards: The development of International Standards plays a crucial role in fostering global harmonization and excellence in various industries. Within the realm of management systems, the ISO Technical Committee 176 (ISO/TC 176) takes the lead. ISO/TC 176 is responsible for developing & maintaining standards related to QM & QA. Below are the ways , how ISO/TC 176 manages the intricate process of creating ISO management standards. -     Inception of Ideas: The journey of an ISO management standard often begins with the identification of a need within a specific industry or a global consensus for standardized practices. This need may arise from technological advancements, changes in regulatory requirements, or a growing demand for enhanced efficiency and quality. -     Proposal and Planning: Once the need is recognized, member countries, industry representatives, or other stakeholders propose the development of a new standard to ISO/TC 176. The committee evaluates the proposal, considering factors such as feasibility, relevance, and potential benefits to the industry. -     International Collaboration: ISO/TC 176 is a multinational committee composed of experts from various countries, ensuring diverse perspectives and a global approach to standardization. Working groups, task forces, & experts collaborate internationally to draft & review the standard's content. This ensures that the standard reflects best practices from a broad range of industries & cultural contexts. -     Consensus Building: The development of ISO management standards involves a consensus-building process. Drafts of the standard are circulated among member countries & relevant stakeholders for review & comments. This process allows for refinements based on practical insights, experiences, & diverse viewpoints, to ensure that the it is robust & widely applicable. -     Revision & Continuous Improvement: ISO/TC 176 recognizes the dynamic nature of industries & ensures regular reviews and revisions are conducted to keep standards aligned. -     Public Input: ISO standards benefit from input & feedback from a wide range of stakeholders & during the development process, consultations & comment periods are held to gather insights from individuals, companies, & communities. -     Publication & Adoption: After thorough development, review, & refinement, it is published & adopted. Conclusion: ISO/TC 176 stands at the forefront of shaping the landscape of quality & excellence in MS. This TC ensures that ISO MSs meet the needs of diverse industries, promote global harmonization, & contribute to CI. The commitment to inclusivity, consensus building, & continuous evolution underscores the significance of ISO/TC 176 in steering the development of standards that drive excellence CQI | The Chartered Quality Institute IRCA | International Register of Certificated Auditors #qaqc #iso #qms #qualityassurance

Being agile and innovative is crucial for success in the constantly changing business landscape. Nick P. of Cloud Engineering at Fidelity Investments has shared a revolutionary approach called "empowered federation," which distributes the ownership of standards and best practices, allowing small groups to lead technical excellence and innovation within organizations. The Federated Model consists of three key elements: 1. Steering Group: This group comprises 5-10 members who are knowledgeable and passionate about specific technology problem areas. They align with the organization's technical needs and promote adopting best practices and standards inspired by open source projects. 2. Focus Groups: These groups work autonomously within their domain and help scale the steering group's strategy across the organization. They consist of engineers and technologists who help drive the adoption of best practices and standards. 3. Community: The heart of the model, where individuals collaborate, share knowledge, and network to foster a culture of continuous learning and improvement. Accelerating Adoption: The key to adopting new practices and standards is education. The model emphasizes the importance of demonstrating the value of these practices in real-world settings, building strategies transparently, measuring progress with clear metrics, and continually returning to education to drive innovation. Embracing a culture of knowledge sharing and best practices is crucial for agility and engineering excellence. Federated groups, supported by passionate communities, offer a robust framework for nurturing such a culture. https://lnkd.in/g_QcfuB5