Engineering students secure future

Ajay Achath Mohanan & Tee Wey Jean

Two undergraduate engineering students from the University's Sunway campus in Malaysia have secured a job and will see their prototype products go into commercial development before they have finished their degree.

Ajay Achath Mohanan and Tee Wey Jean have been offered jobs with Freescale Semiconductor, one of the world's leading technology companies. Freescale will also adopt novel products created by the students as part of their course.

Mr Mohanan, who has already had research published in several internationally-recognised journals, produced prototype software that will be used by product development teams at the company.

"The main aim of my project was to substantially reduce semiconductor testing costs," Mr Mohanan said.

"This will help Freescale develop economical and time-efficient testing systems and ensure the best semiconductors are out in the market ahead of time."

Ms Tee, who has studied in Australia as part of the Monash Abroad program, developed new techniques to detect defects in semiconductor clusters.

"Defects on semiconductor wafers tend to cluster and this is a major setback that happens during the manufacturing process," Ms Tee said.

"I hope that my detection application, which will be adopted by Freescale, will solve this problem."

Mr Mohanan and Ms Tee were among 10 leading engineering students recognised recently in the School of Engineering's Best Final Year Project awards.

Their supervisor Melanie Ooi said the students had a bright future ahead of them.

"They are both very intelligent and hardworking, she said.

"The Freescale team was very impressed with the strong theoretical and practical foundation that Monash has provided for them."

Speaking at the awards, head of the school Professor Serge Demidenko said Monash students could step into the industry with ease and be part of a global community.