CAL STATE NORTHRIDGE : Rockwell, IBM Offers Assistance

In a move designed to increase the partnership between the university and industry, Rockwell International and IBM have helped the School of Engineering and Computer Science at Cal State Northridge buy more than $1.2 million worth of cutting-edge computer technology.

Rockwell announced in September that it will donate $300,000 over three years to the school’s Automation Engineering Program, which teaches graduate students to use computer equipment to design products.

CSUN administrators then struck a deal with IBM to use part of the funds to provide 24 students with 10 new IBM computer workstations valued at more than $1.2 million.

Because of limited state education dollars and outdated equipment, administrators said Rockwell’s donation and IBM’s equipment were the only hope of preparing students to enter the competitive engineering field.

“We can’t rely on state funding,” said Larry Lichten, director of the Automation Engineering Program. “Rockwell came in in the nick of time.”

With the new technology, students can design small products on a computer that can be fed as instructions into a manufacturing process--without ever requiring a blueprint.

“This is the ‘paperless factory’ idea. Very few places actually do this,” said Gary Field, the program’s acting instructional computer consultant. School officials said the donation also will be used to pay four graduate assistants to staff the laboratory. In addition, the university will have access to millions of dollars of updated software through the Higher Education Software Consortium.

Although the donation and discount might seem merely altruistic, all three parties said they are necessary for survival at a time when high-tech industries are struggling with the recession.

For example, the CSUN engineering and computer school has provided Rockwell with more engineers in recent years than any university in the country. Also, an IBM representative said the school has agreed with IBM to develop computer-design software that would run on the IBM RISK-System/8000 workstations.

“CSUN got the discount because it agreed to take part in a software development project,” IBM spokesman Justin Fishbein said. “The discount is in fact an investment.”

“It’s really a case of our destinies being locked,” said John Griffith of Rocketdyne, a division of Rockwell that hires many CSUN graduates.