| The SMA–MST Programme provides a comprehensive multi-disciplinary education. All of the coursework was very practical and closely linked with industry practices. |
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The capstone activity for the Master of Engineering degree is a three-month group project in the manufacturing industry. These projects, done in groups of three students per site, form the basis for the thesis project portion of the degree. The work typically involves solving near-term problems for the company, as well as working at their site under the supervision of MIT and NTU faculty.
A number of companies propose the projects, and early in January a matching process teams the students with their faculty advisors. The projects vary by industry, but the initial project work at each company site takes place during January, followed by once-weekly meetings during the Spring semester. From mid May to mid July, the groups then work full time on-site to complete their projects. Each student then documents his or her contribution with a project thesis, which is submitted to the appropriate MIT advisor for approval.
Recent projects include:
Specific project examples include:
The team mapped out its current planning framework, including demand management, capacity planning, and material planning. After identifying the challenges faced in the current framework, the team proposed the framework for managing demand, capacity, and material planning in terms of strategic, tactical, and operational planning.
Disk drive components must be free of any contaminants, either liquid or particulate, before being sealed into the drive. This team investigated the occurrence of particulates on magnetic drive elements that led to rejected components. In addition to improving the detection methods, they found the origins of the contamination and suggested new production methods to eliminate the problem.
Here, the team was challenged to design a cell phone with an unconventional geometry to help the company build a visual identity with its customers. At the same time, the design needed to incorporate new functions and be manufacturable.
In the intermediate assembly process of the inkjet cartridge, the flex circuit waviness must be controlled to prevent high failures downstream. In this project, a specific waviness index was developed based on linearization and Fourier transform, in order to quantify the waviness to allow better process control and to facilitate investigation on the root cause of such waviness.
In this project, statistical and unconventional path analysis methods were developed to identify yield loss and benchmark equipment in the printer chip wafer fab production line. This led to an automated process to determine the impact of machine selection and critical electrical parameters on wafer yield.
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