So how can universities train students for a continuous and rapidly changing technology? This is especially difficult because it involves both software and hardware, and more domain-specific and increasingly heterogeneous architectures. And regardless of whether these devices are tethered to a battery or plugged into a socket, they need to be much more energy-efficient. Given the slowdown in Moore’s Law and the shrinking power, performance and area/cost benefits of scaling, that often requires a mix of computer science, electrical engineering, and in packages, an increasing amount of mechanical engineering.

“Mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, those disciplinary trainings through those curriculums, they’re accredited and we have a very vigorous process that will continue. But these smaller, bite-sized chunks of curriculum will allow a student to broaden. So as a mechanical engineer, I may not necessarily have either capacity in my studies, or the depth of interest, to take an entire course on heterogeneous integration. But I might be very open to a smaller, bite-sized piece that’s looking at the thermal properties of packaging and new effects occurring because of things like heterogeneous integration. And that is going to be very important for us to be more nimble, to get these things done more quickly.

“You could hire somebody who has a background in electrical engineering or computer engineering, where they understand the low-level hardware and how to build embedded systems and how to develop them, but they don’t usually have a background in securing them,” said Dan Walters, principal embedded security engineer and lead for microelectronics solutions at MITRE. “Or you could look at students with more of a focus in security and cybersecurity. Those typically are computer science degrees. And some universities have computer or cybersecurity degrees, but that’s really software-heavy. Those students don’t understand embedded systems and the unique things that come along with that. What we essentially did was hire from one of those two groups and say, ‘Okay, we’re going to do on-the-job training for the other 50% that you’re missing.'”