Project objectives
ANTITESYS addresses the shortage of highly skilled personnel (designers, engineers, and R&D staff) for the European industrial segment, involved in design or manufacturing of Embedded Systems. The skills required to design high-performance embedded systems are very sophisticated. Silicon technologies allow great processing power to be integrated on a chip, but such power can be fully exploited only if advanced optimised software is provided and tuned to specific application environments. Thus, the professional figure required, is a designer who is conversant with both hardware and software technologies, has a good grasp of application-specific problems, and can successfully work within a team and possibly lead it. Sensitivity to management problems, Intellectual Property issues, and marketing aspects are a necessary complement to technical skills. Such a designer will be able to gain a critical competitive advantage, being able to reduce the time to market window.

A very important fact to be considered is that in Europe, Embedded Systems Design is a domain where very large companies (starting with the silicon providers, CAD tool vendors etc.) co-exist with high-technology SMEs and with Start-Ups. The first class of players has very different priorities from the second : large companies are interested in high-volume end products, while SMEs and even more Start-Ups are quite often focused on products whose technical content is not inferior but have low production volume. The third class of players is made by the "customers" of final Embedded Systems designs - typically, application companies. These engineers must be provided with sufficient training to understand the validity of the IP they buy, but not necessarily with the specialization on particular design aspects required from a designer.

To address this very composite market structure, ANTITESYS aims to provide an extremely flexible set of high-level training offers, coming from variable compositions of teaching units, involvement in project teams, and use of advanced teaching supports (specifically, remote learning and remote team-work). This will make space for different training goals.

ANTITESYS has then three main objectives:

• To train researchers and designers specifically oriented to industrial needs;
• To provide re-skilling for employed personnel;
• To foster cooperation between Academia and Industries in training in microelectronics.

Such training is provided in the Master of Engineering in Embedded Systems Design course: the ALaRI (Advanced Learning and Research Institute) Master at University of Lugano, Switzerland.
Typical students of the ANTITESYS Master are university graduates and junior engineers who are exposed to leading-edge, multi-faceted expertise in the various areas. The theoretical knowledge they have acquired is then put to a practical test by being involved in short/medium term industrial research projects, which are evaluated by academic and industrial experts together. The education thus offered exposes the students to the "best" expertise available in the various technical areas, world-wide, and grants that the training will not be purely academic, but will actually make designers ready for the job market.

Mastercourse training may be completed by subsequent internships, which will both introduce Master graduates to real-world job experience and constitute an effective technology transfer phase for the receiving company. Employed personnel can obtain their Master degree by spreading their education over two years; their Master Project will be agreed upon together with their employers.

Identification of high-level lecturers and selection of applicants are basic guarantees towards a successful training initiative. Providing top international education within a European context is also a measure that counters the brain-drain all too often resulting from sending European graduates to U.S. Universities.

The second objective of ANTITESYS is to provide re-skilling - again, at top levels - for employed personnel: a critical point for European industries is the fast obsolescence of skills of the existing work-force. The great flexibility of the ANTITESYS project allows individual teaching units to be adopted as continued-education modules, whose credits are recognised at the academic and at the industrial level. The ANTITESYS program envisages the replication of individual teaching units (or groups of units) in summer schools at different locations (typically, on the premises of some participating University) or even as in-house courses on the premises of a participating company. Extensive adoption of the European Credit System ensures continuity between the different kinds of training, trainees being able to use previously acquired credits to complete a Master's degree, or to move between institutions of post-graduate education.

To achieve greatest efficiency in a training approach that sees a "distributed" faculty and flexible training schedules, remote-learning solutions will be adopted not only (and not necessarily) for disseminating lectures across different locations, but also for facilitating students' continuous access to Faculty and project tutors and for supporting "remote team-work" between groups of students and their tutors.

Finally, ANTITESYS creates a strong collaboration between Academia and Industries not only regarding what in research is concerned - this is fairly well assessed in European Technical Universities - but also in designing, organising and managing an ambitious training project, not limited to specific continuing-education courses but oriented to a full Master's project.

The management structure of ANTITESYS supports a flexible, up-to-date training project that is both sensitive to industrial needs and academically strong. The ANTITESYS partners intend to involve international experts from U.S. universities and research centres. The University/Industry collaboration will not be limited to ANTITESYS partners, but the project will be open to some form of participation by third parties - in particular, other research centres, SMEs and public agencies active in environment control, health management etc. - e.g., with reference specific projects proposed by Master's students.

The complexity of the training project envisioned is such that it can find its validity only in a trans-national European context, both in terms of the partnership supporting and guiding it and in terms of the targeted students' base. In fact, the ALaRI initiative involved in ANTITESYS already has proved the viability of such a trans-national approach, where a high-level training solution is concerned. Providing greater strength and scope to this first initiative is essential to find a lasting solution.

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