Board of Governors Produce
On Saturday, January 31, thirty of your tireless Society volunteers met all day to kick off the 1998 operation of CPMT.
Your six new elected Members-at-Large were present: William T. Chen, Craig A. Gaw, Larry Mann, C. P. Wong, John M. Segelken, and H. Anthony Chan. Many reassessments of tasks were discussed.
Reports on Society finance by Treasurer Merrill Palmer and membership by Ralph Russell showed the continued health of the Society. CPMT now has a ready reserve of $1.6M which meets the IEEE standard range for soundness. The 1999 budget is being assembled and it appears the transaction prices will remain the same and the CPMT dues may be lowered. There is a general concern that as publications become electronic and libraries resist large "all transaction" fees, the income may decrease from publications before the cost of publication decreases.
Much discussion was held concerning merging or co-locating conferences to make it easier for members to attend a larger percentage of Society functions. A question for the readers, "do you want fewer meetings or simply easier Internet access to summaries of talks at the many meetings you are not able to attend?"
C. P. Wong lead a discussion on creating a Manufacturing Design and Education council. Such a "DFX" council would cut across many existing Societies such as CPMT, MTT, LEOS, and ED. Historically CPMT has sponsored most of IEEE manufacturing engineering thrusts, but no one society has consistently supported study of manufacturing processes as their most important theme. Any volunteers should contact C. P. at 1 609 639 2579.
Dennis Olsen has been gathering portable radio manufacturing information going back into the 1930s in preparation for the CPMT 50th Anniversary celebration. It will be sobering for all the 1990’s engineers to see product from the 1950’s using "surface mount vacuum tubes."
Rao Tummala held a Friday workshop for all Technical Committees. They discussed the important strategic problem of how to fit the emerging technologies into the existing TCs. Addressed were area array, RF components, high temperature electronics, mixed signal design and test, and MEMs packaging. The need for a 10 year roadmap for each TC has become apparent by the active volunteers. One suggestion was that TC-14 change its name given the expanded scope, "The System Packaging and Application Committee."
The upcoming ECTC will have 30 sessions and 2 poster panels. Three luncheon speakers have been signed up. Ten short courses promise to repeat last years success. This meeting should continue to be the main source of reserve funding for your Society.
The Liaison Chair is now William Chen from the Singapore Chapter. The liaison openings with MRS and AVS have received several volunteers since the last newsletter. One of our liaisons with ASME, Ephriam Suhir, described the upcoming InterPACK 99 in Hawaii as well as a workshop in Paris on plastic packaged component reliability.
Among the TC reports was TC-13 on Power Electronics Packaging. Doug Hopkins explained that his many active members actually served 3 societies since their topics had much overlap. This is one of the few TCs that has been constructing a Roadmap. They expect 150 at their next Chicago meeting.
Tony Mak showed the plans for the three upcoming thermal management meetings sponsored by TC-9: Semitherm in San Diego (occurred), I-Therm to be co-located with ECTC in Seattle this May, and the ICT (Thermoelectric) in Japan also in May.
Joe Mantz , new Chair of TC-7 Reliability, rejoiced at the 114 attendees in their Dallas "Accelerated Stress Testing" 2 day workshop. One day of tutorials was also held. The meeting attracted 30 engineers to the CPMT ranks from related disciplines. The AST98 meeting is cosponsored by JPL and will be held in Pasadena September 22-24, 1998.
Michael Lebby, Chair TC-10 Optoelectronics, described the 6 sessions his 20 active members have arranged for the upcoming ECTC. Over the years, this TC has made ECTC the premiere meeting for Optoelectronic packaging.
TC-4, Manufacturing, has now had several years of co-locating our IEMT with SEMICON Southwest in Austin. The 1997 results were 240 attendees; another steady gain. The natural pull of this newly formatted IEMT appears to be about 300. The committee has formed a home web page.
Jack Balde gave a quick review of TC-14 activities. They just completed their Tsukuba Japan workshop with the maximum allowed attendance of 125. IBM has agreed to be the next company to chair this annual workshop. This "System Packaging and Applications Committee" is prepared for their May meeting at Padre Island (see preview elsewhere in this newsletter).