CALCUTTA, JULY 14: Faced with the challenge of shaping `more flexible engineers' for the 21st century, the country's oldest technology school at Kharagpur is discarding its old academic course to make way for a new-look curriculum."Keeping pace with time, we are refashioning the curriculum, to be operational in the 2000-2001 session, and create engineers with inter-disciplinary skills able to handle multifarious jobs," director of IIT, Ghosh said.IIT is in the final stages of setting up Asia's biggest very large scale integration (VLSI) design laboratory sponsored by the IIT foundation, USA, and donor industries National Semiconductor Corporation, Cadence and Synopsis under a consultancy agreement for US $2,60,000 per year."The laboratory, to be inaugurated in August, will be mainly used by the undergraduate students in electronics, computer science and engineering and electrical engineering," Ghosh said.Construction of an academic complex housing the largest computer centre in the country along with the G S Sanyal school of telecommunication and information technology school was also underway at the campus, he said.In a boost to IIT's international collaboration programme, the institute is having final round negotiations with Fraunhofer Institute of Berlin and General Electric of USA for a technology transfer tie-up in the near future."The institute has received more than 200 sponsored research projects and consultancy programmes from national, international, government and other funding agencies to the tune of more than Rs 23 crore, highest among all IITs," Ghosh added.
