Nanoscale education for semiconductor design

Over the last decades, nanotechnology had established itself as the upcoming revolution in science and technology. The ability of manipulating material at the atomic and molecular levels allowed nanotechnology to open an entirely new paradigm of devices and products. In the semiconductor industry several new nanodevices have been proposed to replace the classical CMOS devices that have been used over the last four decades. These new nanodevices have shown significant potential to overcome the fundamental limits of current CMOS devices. However, limited educational resources and processes are available to prepare future nanotechnology engineers and scientists to integrate these promising nanodevices into the main semiconductor manufacturing streams. This paper proposes new learning structures and processes to propagate nanotechnology learning resources over the pervasive Web. The proposed approach is illustrated by a case study centered around the manufacturing of future nanodevices. We adopt standard structures and processes to organize and navigate through digital instructional contents, such as IEEE LOM and IMS LD. In doing so, we aim at streamlining the propagation of reusable repositories across the open Web to facilitate the integration of nanotechnology learning resources into the rising social trend of massively open online courses (or MOOCs).