For the purposes of strengthening cooperation between industry and university, and facilitating the application of cutting edge technology to the now red hot digital home life, NTU's SOC Center disclosed its second quarterly report on research and development on July 26th. The theme of the report was "Multimedia and the Prospective Design of Communication Systems."

Professor Liang-Gee Chen of the Department of Electrical Engineering, who also serves as the managing director of the SOC Center, says that since the life cycle of electronic products has become very short nowadays, farsighted research must be closely linked with product development in order to create new waves of innovation in the age of digital life. Therefore, cooperation between industry and the academic society has acquired new significance. SOC Center's 2nd quarterly report attracted dozens of general managers and vice presidents from such renowned companies as Media Tek, TMSC, UMC, Himax Technology, Sunplus Technology, and Genesys Logic to participate in the forum.

With regard to the technological reports released in the forum, Vice President Chih-tsung Tsai of Himax Technology, Special Assistant to the Chairman Ching-huan Wu of Via Technology, Senior Manager Pei-chi Wei of Silicon Intergration Systems, and Manager Chi-feng Wu of Realtek Semiconductors all expressed their valuable opinions and gave substantive suggestions. Thus, exchange between industry and university was efficiently achieved.

In addition to the current achievements, industry members expressed their desire to learning more about the direction of NTU's future research. In response to this request, SOC's managing director Dr. Liang-Gee Chen said that in the future the Center would arrange other types of activities to induce discussion, so that industry members and university staff would learn to use their resources more efficiently.