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7th Topical Meeting on Electrical Performance
of Electronic Packaging
The 7th Topical Meeting on Electrical Performance of Electronic
Packaging, EPEP’98 was held on the East-Coast for the first
time, on the grounds of West Point Academy. The Academy is located
on the bank of the Hudson river at its narrowest spot, flanked
on both sides by the Catskill Mountains draped in a palette of
fall colors during this time of the year. 168 attendees enjoyed
the breathtaking views all during the breaks and a river trip
in a historic boat on the second day of the meeting.
In spite of the new location, the attendance was maintained just
as strong as always with an increase of 15% of submitted papers
compared to 1997. This made the selection process much more difficult.
The conference had 50 papers in 17 oral sessions and 16 during
the Monday night open forum (poster). Seven invited speakers from
IBM, NIST, Micro Substrates Corp., Raytheon, University of Nottingham,
and University of Colorado covered such important topics as the
practical limits for the extendibility of CMOS technology, packaging
for the latest G5 IBM S/390 server, measurement projects for electronic
interconnections at NIST, microwave and millimeter wave BGA package
technology development, MEMS for millimeter wave systems, and
review and future potentials of the TLM and FDTD modeling techniques.
The first invited paper was the keynote address for the conference,
another "first" for 1998.
Two other activities were initiated in 1998. A Best Student Paper
Award was sponsored by Intel Corp. in the form of a very generous
donation of a 400 MHz desktop computer and $2000. The lucky student
was Pavan K. Gunupudi from Carleton University, Canada, who made
an excellent presentation in the last session of the conference.
This made the competition quite tense all the way to the end.
Congratulations to Pavan! All the other students were very well
prepared as well. Our thanks to Tawfik Arabi from Intel Corp.
and his committee for initiating this award and selecting the
most deserving candidate. At the end of the day on Wednesday,
25 attendees were bused to the nearby IBM East Fishkill location
and were able to tour the clean room facilities for the thin-film
on MCM fabrication line. The tour and presentation sponsored by
IBM were very well received. Our thanks go to George Katopis (IBM
Poughkeepsie) and Herb Stoller (IBM East Fishkill) for organizing
this trip. Two citations were also presented to Don DeGroot of
NIST and Luc Martens of University of Ghent for continued support
given to the conference.
The conference was preceded by six short tutorials presented throughout
Sunday. The topics covered were: electrical performance estimation,
electrical package modeling, application of the FDTD technique,
power distribution design and modeling, high-frequency measurement
techniques, and model order reduction techniques.
The strongest sessions during the conference were the power distribution
modeling and simulation, and modeling and model order reduction
techniques. These two topics had the largest number of papers
submitted, attendees, and spanned six sessions.
The 1999 conference will be held October 25-27, in San Diego and
Kyocera America, Inc. will be hosting the meeting. Dr. Chong-Il
Park was nominated Regional Chair for 1999. After four great years,
I stepped down as conference co-chair and I want to thank my co-chairs:
Prof Vijai Tripathi (1994-1996) and Prof. Madhavan Swaminathan
(1997) and the technical Program Committee for their help and
support. I enjoyed meeting so many interesting people and learning
so much from the excellent papers submitted to the conference.
I wish Ravi Kaw from Hewlett Packard great success in his new
function as conference co-chair!
See you all in 1999 in San Diego.
-- Alina Deutsch, IBM
Pictures: Hotel Thayer, the site of the conference