Education and practice factory : from factory design to first product delivery

Abstract

The MIT Education and Practice Factory was launched with support from the Massachusetts Manufacturing Innovation Initiative as part of the education and workforce development program of American Institute of Manufacturing Photonics. It is an advanced manufacturing facility integrated in an academic environment, and is designed to be utilized by three different groups, including researchers, students, and professional manufacturing staff from industry. The current capability of the MIT Education and Practice Factory offers equipment and process solutions for packaging photonics products, including chip packaging and testing. These capabilities fit very well with the research and commercial needs of research groups and industrial partners. The manufacturing scale-up requirements associated with technologies for Test, Assembly and Packaging (TAP) are significant for the photonics industry, and contribute to about seventy percent of the entire production cost. Advances in manufacturing technologies are critical to the value-add supply chain. In this thesis, the creation process of the MIT Education and Practice Factory will be reviewed. Three major stages of the project will be covered in detail, including (1) factory setup, (2) pilot products development, and (3) production ramp up.