Tailoring continuing education to the needs of SME's

It is the purpose of this paper to report on experiences made at a Fraunhofer Institute for microelectronics in working with SME's and with industry in general. Procedures have been developed that cover a variety of needs from technology transfer to continuing education. The key element is the amount of involvement from the side of the company which can be matched to the individual need. The need varies between the question whether a new technology such as microelectronics should influence a company at all, to the one that occurs if a decision has been made and a new product based on this technology has to be developed. A range of educational "tools" is applied ranging from consultation over short courses to the possibility of sending one or several engineers for some time to the institute in order to work as part of the project team. (AIS-A)