Collaboration between Industry and Academia in Test Research

Even though there is a great need for innovative advances and excellent research opportunities in test and diagnosis, various issues faced by academic and industrial test researchers seem to make it harder to perform research that could create wide impact to the industry. Diversifying technologies, limited access to design and manufacturing data, increasing cost for building required infrastructure for experiments with reasonable scale, application-specific nature of test solutions, etc. are among those often cited issues. The panel will discuss how academia and industry have contributed to test technology in the past, evaluate the current health of academic and industrial test research and explore how academia and industry can collaborate to meet the challenges in test and to increase its impact to the industry. Specifically, the panel will discuss the following topics: What collaboration models between university and industry in the test area are most/least successful? What are the emerging research topics that academic or industrial research is ill equipped to make real contributions? Will promoting the academic test research to “get real”, “get practical”, and “work closely with industry”, adversely discourage high risk, “long term” basic research and pursuing major breakthroughs? 1081-7735/00 $10.00