Automotive, Internet of Things, Smart Home and Smart Cities, infrastructure, industrial automation, photovoltaics and renewable energy, precision and power electronics, artificial intelligence, robotics and quantum computing.
The whole technology which is changing our lives, and which is also profoundly changing the paradigms of industrial production as we have known it up to now, passes through Catania and the so-called district ofEtna Valleya true hotbed of microelectronics, a site increasingly rich in companies and multinationals who choose to corroborate the virtuous ecosystem that is developing under the Volcano.
It is an increasingly interconnected world, the one in which we live, in men and even in objects, which cannot do without the presence of increasingly high-performance circuits and chips, thanks to materials such as Silicon Carbide and Gallium Nitride, an evolution of the traditional Silicon which are produced, tested and applied in Catania.
And if in the 90s theEtna Valley was practically a synonym of STMicrolectronics, today a particularly rich habitat of companies has arisen around the French multinational that leverage the physical proximity with customers and competitors, and above all on the possibility of establishing profitable bidirectional collaborations with the Universityencouraging and enlisting ‘talents’ capable of planning the future.
The University of Catania has once again taken it upon itself to bring together all these presences, put them around a table and have them compare with each other, with the primary objective of capturing the attention of young Sicilian high school students.
The speakers’ table
The meeting with the title Catania and microelectronicswhich took place in the great hall of the Technological Engineering Centre, on the initiative of the Department of Electrical, Electronic and IT Engineering, of the Catania section of the Italian Association of Electrotechnics, Electronics, Automation, IT and Telecommunications with the patronage of the Italian Society of Electronics, offered numerous ideas in this sense, allowing companies such as 3Sun, STMicroelectronics, Advantest, Analog Devices, EDA Industries, NXP Semiconductors, Renesas Electronics, Synergie Cad and Technoprobe, together with the Institute of Microelectronics and Microsystems of the Cnr, to present themselves, to illustrate your own activity ‘core’ and to launch numerous ‘hooks’ towards those who may be interested in choosing the path of specific training in this sector.
«The future is always in the hands of those who know how to anticipate it», stated the ‘Drake’ Enzo Ferrari: but in this case, it was underlined, the future itself incredibly anticipated the times. The full-bodied investments that these companies have carried out and the global economic situation, together with international programs to bring back the production of chip in Europe and in the USA, ensure that the need for qualified figures and the availability of jobs, even in the Sicilian context, is not a simple prospect, but a very current urgency.
Every year, in the context of Etna Valley, at least 50 to 150 would be needed new engineers in Electronics, it has been said, just a few years ago there were just seven students enrolled in the master’s degree course at the University of Catania. Now the average is thirty per year, but we need to do even more, especially to involve girls more.
«Catania is a cornerstone of microelectronics – underlined the director of Dieei Giovanni Muscato -, our department is pushing to recruit new forces, also to respond to a demand for skills that has never been so strong.”
Bachelor’s and master’s degrees, recall the respective presidents Bruno Andò and Alfio Dario Grassoallow you to acquire basic and then characterizing skills: «The added value – they add – derives from the continuous meeting with companies throughout the training course, through orientation, internships, tutoring, laboratory activities, and is reflected in a very high employment rate already within a year of graduation.”
A moment of the meeting
«With this initiative – stated the prof. Salvatore Pennisi and the president Aeit Catania Agostino Galluzzo – we give voice to the semiconductor sector, offering an academic platform to enhance the entire training chain, starting from schools such as the Galilei and Fermi scientific high schools and the Archimede technical institute which have sent their own delegation of students”.
At the center of the meeting were presentations by Cosimo Gerardi (3SUN), Alessandro Rugginenti (Advantest), Giuseppe Patti (Analog Devices), Filippo Giannazzo (Cnr-Imm), Ivano Redigolo (Eda Industries), Domenico Cristaudo (NXP Semiconductors), Antonio Magazzù (Renesas Electronics), Francesco Minerva (STM), Giuseppe Sensini (Synergie CAD), Massimo Mastrocola and Chiara Lauria (Technoprobe), focused on current innovations, investments and immediate and future development prospects of semiconductorswhich will likely lead to thousands of hires including specialized technicians, three-year graduates, master’s graduates and doctorates, also in other STEM disciplines such as chemistry, physics, computer science.
In conclusion, electronic engineering in Catania presents excellent results in terms of employment, promotion of gender equality and a growing increase in registrations. The drive towards excellence in training for the design of integrated circuits could finally receive a further boost from the Chips.IT Foundation, which can play a key role in further strengthening the electronic engineering sector in Italy and Catania.
