Cultivating Intellectual Property Education in the Electronics Engineering Curriculum: A Case Study in Integrated Circuit Design

Abstract

A survey on engineering students' attitude toward intellectual property (IP) education has been conducted in several China's universities, revealing the need for more effective teaching and learning methods. To improve the students' IP awareness and the capability of innovative learning, a small module of patent and circuit design case study has been included in an engineering course, namely, radio-frequency integrated circuit (IC) design, which is offered to senior undergraduate or postgraduate students in a top engineering university in China. Along with the instruction of the RFIC design techniques, the concepts of the IP for the ICs are presented, followed by the analysis of innovative circuits to explore potential legal issues. The feedback of the students suggests that the curriculum is considerably helpful to enrich the knowledge of engineering students in both the design technique and IP awareness.

Survey on the Patent Law Awareness and the Entrepreneurial Trend of Greece’s Graduates of Technology Institutes

“…The majority of studies and surveys in literature refer to the point of view of technology management professionals, inventors, R&D firms and technological companies and universities as far as how to develop an e-learning IP support program, a course of law for computer professionals and elearning course of IP for students. Although, there exist a study in the literature, see [9] including a survey conducted in 5 China's universities for engineering students' as for the need of IP education, to the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first time that a survey, which refers to graduate students of Technical Institutes in Greece and the rest world, is conducted and examines their knowhow on Entrepreneurship and on Patent Law, in the direction of supporting a potential technological invention. In our survey, similarly with earlier results excluding from the literature, we realize the primordial importance of developing and inserting in the technical universities' curriculum a course for IP activities to support invention.…”

“…In [9], a survey on engineering students' as for IP education is conducted in 5 China's universities, concluding the need for strengthening IP awareness in the Electronics Engineering Curriculum. A design of a course is also proposed by using a case study in integrated circuits.…”

A Course Outline for Education in Legal and Managerial Aspects of Technology

“…In [15] the authors claim that education in IP is an important part of engineering education because students need to have basic knowledge in ethics and IP issues in order to invent without the risk of infringement.…”