Abstract:

The MicroElectronics Cloud Alliance (MECA) project brings together 18 partners from higher education institutions and enterprises to develop Cloud-based European infrastructure and organisation for education in micro- and nanoelectronics providing a range of open educational resources, remote access and sharing of educational and professional software, remote and practice-based learning facilities.

The aim of the MECA project is the definition and development of cloud-based European infrastructure and organization for education in micro- and nanoelectronics providing a range of open educational resources, remote access and sharing of educational and professional software, remote and practice-based learning facilities.

Neither university can afford the necessary infrastructure, clean rooms, technology and experts in all fields of this multidisciplinary science. Sharing of laboratory experiences, CAD tools, project ideas, and a common infrastructure represents a sort of “educational cloud” on top of the cloud software/hardware infrastructure.

8 European HEIs and 8 enterprises are developing e-learning materials for 21 courses on: CAD systems, microelectronics technologies, test, characterisation and application of integrated circuits and systems, and we will provide them as open educational resources to strengthen the virtual mobility. Each university will provide remote access to its facilities, laboratory experiments or software systems for the partners in a cloud teaching system, giving them access to new resources. The common ones can be optimized, reducing the singular cost per institute and increasing the available computational and structural power.

At this stage of the project, we have done the need analysis and the feasibility study and we are implementing the mClouds system and the shared server infrastructure, shared e-learning resources and the remote access to the CAD tools according the following three schemes:
1. Infrastructure as a Service model: private Cloud of each partner institution for sharing institutional IT infrastructure. Then a hybridization or federation of several Clouds will be applied to support temporary peak requirements, eliminating the need to oversize the private infrastructure.
2. Platform as a Service: Cloud-based WEB based e-learning applications in micro- nanoelectronics to share contents at European level, related to the deployment of WEB based e-learning applications.
3. Software as a Service model: mClouds for sharing CAD software, remote access to the partners’ CAD laboratories. Expensive software will be shared between academic institutions and infrastructure costs can be shared accordingly.

The expected impact will be on the:
- students – the highest quality of the specialised courses developed by the best departments in the field, the opportunity to train practical skills and competences with remote access to laboratories with advanced equipment and facilities;
- teachers – rich infrastructure and new shared teaching materials;
- universities – the European dimensions in HE: curricular development, virtual mobility of students and academic staff, integrated programmes of study, training and research;
- university-business alliance – the education responsive to the labour market needs, graduated students prepared for the job, enterprises satisfied by the knowledge and skills of young specialists.

Keywords:

European Cloud-based learning environment and infrastructure, Nanoelectronics, Open educational resources.