Your CPMT Society Board of Governors authorized a three-year series of grants aimed at encouraging creation of instructional material or simulations aimed at filling gaps in next-generation electronics packaging education. The material should have potential broad impact and be available to the global community without cost. Matching our US$40,000 per year ($120,000 total) is about $250,000 of funding over three years that we obtained from the US National Science Foundation, our partner in this endeavor. We used $90,000 of this total in 1998 to fund three $30,000 grants; we are funding an additional five such grants this year. We anticipate making the remaining four grants based on proposals received at the ECTC in Las Vegas in 2000. I would like to profile the results from last year's three grants, then explain how we intend to make these materials available to the packaging community worldwide.

High-Speed Propagation Visualization Project
A grant for $30,000 was given last year to Prof. José Schutt-Ainé in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at the University of Illinois/Urbana-Champaign. His project was in the field of Signal Integrity, where he has created a visualization and simulation tool for our use. His department had already written some code that allowed students to enter antenna parameters from a web browser, then have the server do some mathematically intensive computing, resulting in the return of a graphical representation of the antenna's pattern to the student's browser. Now this has been extended to show wave characteristics and crosstalk for transmission lines in package substrates. The web page uses Java to gather the student information and validate it; this is then transmitted to the server, where the intensive computations are invoked. The results are supplied as a Java applet that is sent to the student's browser for
visualization.
This tool can be used as a supplement to classroom instruction, allowing the student to do various "what if" dramatizations of geometries for interconnects in substrates. We have hopes that this will develop into a "virtual classroom" for signal transmission and crosstalk investigation, for asynchronous learning over the web. This could be especially useful to materials and packaging engineers who do not have formal grounding in electromagnetics, wave propagation, and RF design. Professors can assign homework problems requiring the student to interact with this visualization engine over the internet.

Thermal Design Instructional Modules
Our second grant was given to Professors Avram Bar-Cohen (U. of Minnesota), Sushil Bhavnani (Auburn Univ), and Yogendra Joshi (U. of Maryland). Their project involves a layered approach to delivering education on thermal design and analysis, suitable for various types of students and professionals. The modules developed to date include air and liquid cooling, computational fluid dynamics modeling and microfabrication techniques. The student is to read and absorb the assigned materials from the website (videos, class notes) prior to the weekly class, thus freeing classroom time for discussion, expansion, and extensions of the material. This material was used in an actual internet-taught class involving students at all three universities and two corporate sites, using desktop video conferencing hardware and software. One of the strengths of this teaching method was that each two-person team was tasked with coming up with a design that made the best use of tradeoffs to acheive a goal. These case studies were posted to the website by each team the day before the class, so all teams could study all designs; then the strengths and weaknesses of each design could be discussed in class, and lessons could be drawn.

The Virtual Packaging Laboratory
Our third 1998 grant was to Professor Gary May in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at Georgia Tech. This work extends earlier "virtual lab" work in the field of semiconductor processing, and builds on Georgia Tech's emphasis on design-build-operate projects for students. This project was to create a model of the various substrate-processing stations in the packaging lab, so the student could learn about the equipment on the website, and even input various parameters for the process (such as time, temperature) to visualize the results (such as dielectric film etching) -- all without queueing up for scarce equipment resources or risking damaging the machines. The student gets a step-by-step explanation of each machine and what it does, and can also access the theory behind the process. There is even a map of the laboratory -- the student is able to visualize the equipment and flow before entering the "real" lab to constuct a substrate.

Next Steps
You can access and "play" with these newly developed modules now. See our website at www.cpmt.org/education/ for links and more information. Your CPMT Society plans to continue to develop our webserver capability, both for the modules described above and also for other contributed modules (more on that aspect in the September Newsletter). Eventually we plan to have IEEE servers in major geographies (one in Europe, one in Asia, one in North America) so that engineers and students can easily access them for better learning. I'll report on the next five funded projects in a future article.

Submitted by Paul Wesling,
Vice-President, Publications for the CPMT Society
Compaq Computer, Tandem Division