D&E(Design and Engineering) sector is a pillar in an enterprise. Almost all the product developments and customer engagement will go through the D&E sector. D&E integration cluster, an intersection point in company’s multi-business lines, is responsible to identify the critical value and steer the direction in the engagements. The amount of information and workload that need to be processed is massive, and we have to give our voice in time in order to guide the discussion properly. Therefore, being productive is essential for the D&E integration cluster to meet the expectation from the outside world. There are three apsects in my opinion which could help be productive in overall D&E organization.

Integration is part of a product design process where a fabricated product need to be tested and qualified. When the test is done, the result is fed back to the function design teams as a go/no go decision. As an member in the integration cluster, you are expected to have a broad view of understanding on the product knowledge, you are responsible for giving a thought about the product performance with supportive evidences, and last but not least you need to define a simple metric to trace the improvement of product performance. With these three skill sets, you are in a good shape to handle the integration work.

Optics is awesome. The reason why we can see this world is because of light shining on the surface of objects around us. Light does not only help us know what those objects are but could also be a carrier in internet connection. I have chosen optical engineering as my career for quite some years. During my career, I’ve seen many interesting applications popping up from this fundamental physics. What still drives me to continue this journey are those art of engineering applications which are facilitated by complex optical designs. If you would like to have optics working in your device, your instruments or your network, you have to design a system to serve your purpose. Among these optical applications Lithography system seems to be one of the most complicated giant in the industry. Let’s see how we can breakdown this giant monsters into the basic modules to further understand how it works.

我在前面談到希望有機會能談談我自己在專業博士的心路歷程，今天終於有機會了。關於專業博士的介紹，請參閱我所寫的系列文。我想在這篇分享的是在專業博士的體悟。記得剛來到荷蘭時，人生地不熟，英文也只是剛剛好，縱使有時Eindhoven天氣明媚，也無心思好好認識荷蘭女孩。進入學校時再次感受到久違已久的青春氣息，緩緩撲鼻而來，與我同一時間進入PDEng修行的是該所學校碩士畢業的高瘦荷蘭男生Nick。如果你曾經在異地生活過，你會知道有當地人作為嚮導，會解決生活中遇到的許多疑難雜症。

Do you believe that you are unique in the world? Do you truly know who you are? In today’s collaborative society we are not only busy with our own tasks but also at some point we need to team up with other members in order to grow up and to achieve success. You might have a list of people you are in favor of within an organization and perhaps also a black list of people you don’t like. But what if you have no choice but to work with unfavored people, how to ensure a peaceful working relations? In this post I would like to guide you on knowing who you are in a learning cycle, how to keep good communication with others, how to give other feedback, and most importantly how to maintain good working relations based on who you are. Before we deeply dive into some soft skills, let’s first explore ourselves.

If you have stayed in the technical industry for many years, you might hear this quote sometimes “We are always good at being a technical expert but we somehow need to sell our ideas to customers”. The technical industry is a business-based environment where any person who wants to realize its own marvelous idea needs to get approved by the market. How do we prepare ourselves to be ready for this demand? Do we have enough personal skills to convince our customers to accept the ideas?

Think about a situation where you were asked to give a presentation about your new technical findings tomorrow. You know that some major customers who come from different level sit under the stage waiting for your story. What the story are you going design such that they will follow your thought? How do you present your story such that customers will not get bored by your presentation? In this post I am going to show theatrical approaches which will help you communicate with your audience and construct the storyline.

Often time we heard project project… floating around in the daily conversation. What exactly is a project and what people actually do in project management? These questions will be answered in this series. First, project is a collection of planed work that needs to be done in order to achieve a defined goal. The goal and the result of the project should be agreed with customers. If one would like to position the role of projects together with improvisation and routine, the table below shows the comparison among these three. In addition to the predictability of the result and the duration of work, the interesting thing is that commitment is also a feature which differentiates one from another. For any project, we must commit the result with customers and the result needs to be recognized by customers.

This is the part 2 of the design phase. For people who haven’t seen the part 1, please have a look. This will help you integrate the whole design flow.

Design analysis and development

In a industrial work flow, there are couple of modules which are involved in a product/solution design. A complete design requires not only generating ideas but also verifying that idea as a workable solution. How do we evaluate if our idea works as we expected? You need to establish some sorts of experiments in which a clear analysis proves your point. Therefore, engineering statistics steps in into your experiments, which guides you what to do and how to analyze the results. A useful websites named Engineering statistics handbook offers a completely overview for the experimental problems your will encounter in the engineering field. These problems can be categorized into several modules which are exploration, measure, characterize… etc. If any of them fit your current problem, have a look in the details. When you look into each category, you will notice that the approaches used in different categories are very similar because they were originated from the fundamental statics methods, such as data exploration, regression, variance analysis and design of experiments, for which another online course website is recommended to guide you step by step on understanding these statistics methods. In this post I will focus pretty much on the usage of design of experiment and design for six sigma and how these methods are incorporated into the design flow.

As the overview shown in the series-1, design is a key activity in the PDEng track. I would like address what Design is in this post. Throughout history competitive companies are always looking into innovations to improve their business line. A schematic flow can simply explain how innovation works from the beginning to the end.

A company typically starts to find its own unsatisfaction from either its product performance, development cycle or manufacturing process. They need to understand why the problems are there. The problem can be things like defects in a product, bottleneck in the development cycle or bugs in a manufacturing process. Some of them can be found in a simple diagnosis, and others might need extensive research to understand the phenomenon. These are all in the discovery phase. The design phase can start when the problems are concrete. There are some powerful techniques, such as Modeling, Design Method for Development(DMD) and Design analysis, which will be introduced later to help the design process. After a solution is generated from the design phase, we can deliver it to the deployment phase in most marketing activities are involved. Design is clearly an inter-link between the problem and the end user.

This is the first post of this series in which I will show you the overview of the PDEng program. PDEng program is placed at the 3rd educational cycle which requires the preliminary qualified study such as master degree to continue with. The aim of this program is to train you to be a Technical design expert who can solve complex technical problems by design and lead the design to be accepted by customers. More information regarding PDEng can be found on the TUe and the 4TU federation websites. In this post, I would focus on the hard-core activities and what you can expect from the PDEng program.

Program roadmap