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Describes the “Journey to Excellence” (JTE) empowerment program at Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). Emphasizes the role of two lower level managers in promoting its progress. Shows how factors such as team skills and problem‐solving training, efforts to bring supervisory and engineering functions to production worker level, and support from higher level executives led to the success of the program.

This case is designed to achieve the following learning objectives: recognize the impact of personality traits on leadership style; identify the key elements in a turnaround strategy; examine leadership best practices from a gender perspective; and assess the role of strategic decision-making on company growth.

The case study describes how Lisa Su (Su), the first woman CEO of Advanced Micro Devices, helped turn around the debt-laden semiconductor firm within a decade through her transformational leadership, vision and values. The case first touches upon Su’s early life and education and the influence of her parents in shaping her personality. It then focuses on the first half of Su’s career, during which she was working on semiconductor projects and was involved in research and product development, and how she made the gradual shift to a people management role in her stint of over a decade at IBM followed by a leadership opportunity at Freescale Semiconductor Inc. The case then describes Su’s move to AMD in 2012 as Senior Vice President and General Manager of the company’s global business divisions at a time when AMD was nearly US$2.5bn in debt and revenues had increased only once in the previous five years. There were also rumors of bankruptcy and spin-offs after the company lost more than US$1bn in the year 2012. The cas

This case is meant for MBA students as part of their Organizational Behavior, Leadership, and Strategic Management curriculum.

Teaching notes Student feedback details.

CCS 11: Strategy.

This article reports on the 4th International Micromachine Symposium and Exhibition Micromachine (1998) which were held in Tokyo, 28‐30 October 1998 and also serves as a supplementary information to the article “Micro sensor developments in Japan” in this special “Micro sensors” issue of the journal. The symposium and exhibition are the annual showcase of the current status of the “Micromachine technology” project which is sponsored by the Japanese Government. Unlike efforts in other countries the Japanese approach is unique in trying to achieve real workable micromachines by establishing micro mechatronics technology. It differs from, for instance, the American MEMS where research is heavily dependent on silicon processing technology to fabricate micro devices on chips. Various kinds of micro sensors are now under development. These initiatives are well worth watching.

Intel is the world’s largest producer of integrated circuit chips and has customers around the world. But it also faces stiff competition from companies such as Advanced Micro Devices, Motorola and Texas Instruments. In 1997, Intel began to look into e‐business. Right from the start the focus was on customer needs. To reflect this the sales and marketing division was given responsibility for driving the e‐business project forward.

Due to oxide formation at the die backside, excessive non‐wetting and voiding can occur especially for the larger die (100K sq. mil) by gold eutectic die attach. Such voiding can cause die lift‐off and cracking. Ag/glass seems to be a promising candidate. However, it has some shortcomings. First, solder seal hermeticity reject may occur due to nickel diffusing through gold metallisation and being oxidised on the surface of the multilayer package. Secondly, for those devices requiring backside contact, gold metallisation on the die backside becomes the barrier for the reaction between the silicon and the glass. The adhesion may be degraded. The factors which may overcome these shortcomings will be discussed.

Accurate prediction of temperature and heat is crucial for the design of various nano/micro devices in engineering. Recently, investigation has been carried out for calculating the heat flux of gas flow using the concept of sliding friction because of the slip velocity at the surface. The purpose of this study is to exetend the concept of sliding friction for various types of nano/micro flows.

A new type of Smoluchowski temperature jump considering the viscous heat generation (sliding friction) has recently been proposed (Le and Vu, 2016b) as an alternative jump condition for the prediction of the surface gas temperature at solid interfaces for high-speed non-equilibrium gas flows. This paper investigated the proposed jump condition for the nano/microflows which has not been done earlier using four cases: 90° bend microchannel pressure-driven flow, nanochannel backward facing step with a pressure-driven flow, nanoscale flat plate and NACA 0012 micro-airfoil. The results are compared with the available direct simulation Monte Carlo results. Also, this paper has demonstrated low-speed preconditioned density-based algorithm for the rarefied gas flows. The algorithm captured even very low Mach numbers of 2.12 × 10⁻⁵.

Based on this study, this paper concludes that the effect of inclusion of sliding friction in improving the thermodynamic prediction is case-dependent. It is shown that its performance depends not only on the slip velocity at the surface but also on the mean free path of the gas molecule and the shear stress at the surface. A pressure jump condition was used along with the new temperature jump condition and it has been found to often improve the prediction of surface flow properties significantly.

This paper extends the concept of using sliding friction at the wall for micro/nano flows. The pressure jump condition was used which has been generally ignored by researchers and has been found to often improve the prediction of surface flow properties. Different flow properties have been studied at the wall apart from only temperature and heat flux, which was not done earlier.

This study aims to investigate the options for additive rapid prototyping methods in microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) technology. Additive rapid prototyping technologies, such as stereolithography (SLA), fused deposition modeling (FDM) and selective laser sintering (SLS), all commonly known as three-dimensional (3D) printing methods, are reviewed and compared with the resolution requirements of the traditional MEMS fabrication methods.

In the 3D print approach, the entire assembly, parts and prototypes are built using various plastic and metal materials directly from the software file input, completely bypassing any additional processing steps. The review highlights their potential place in the overall process flow to reduce the complexity of traditional microfabrication and long processing cycles needed to test multiple prototypes before the final design is set.

Additive manufacturing (AM) is a promising manufacturing technique in micro-device technology.

In the current state of 3D printing, microfluidic and lab-on-a-chip devices for fluid handling and manipulation appear to be the most compatible with the 3D print methods, given their fairly coarse minimum feature size of 50-500 μm. Future directions in the 3D materials and method development are identified, such as adhesion and material compatibility studies of the 3D print materials, wafer-level printing and conductive materials development. One of the most important goals should be the drive toward finer resolution and layer thickness (1-10 μm) to stimulate the use of the 3D printing in a wider array of MEMS devices.

The review combines two discrete disciplines, microfabrication and AM, and shows how microfabrication and micro-device commercialization may benefit from employing methods developed by the AM community.