IEEE CPMT announces Pioneering Education Development Programs
The CPMT Society pioneers a fundamentally new paradigm of educating the microelectronics community. In contrast to the continuing education typically achieved by means of short courses, development of new and innovative educational programs, particularly those that are based on WEB dissemination, aimed at entirely new ways of educating undergraduate and graduate students has been instituted. (We continue to do the traditional very well also. CPMT involved almost 400 people this year in short courses at its premier conference of ECTC.) This WEB program is funded by CPMT and NSF and the NSF involvement is through the Packaging Research Center at Georgia Tech. The total funding is about $400k and is expected to produce about 10 new educational programs that can be considered National Courses in Strategic Microelectronics and Packaging Technologies. The first three recipients of these awards, each $30K, were Profs. Bar Cohen of University of Minnesota, Bhavnani of Auburn, and Joshi of Maryland; Prof. Gary May of Georgia Tech; and Jose Schutt-Aine of University of Illinois. These programs are expected to lead to the development of National Courses in Thermal Management, Virtual Prototyping, and Signal Integrity respectively. For a more complete report, see Paul Wesling's Publications Report.

CPMT expects to announce the second set of awards this summer perhaps to as many as five universities to continue to develop new and novel educational programs. These new awards will be based on ten proposals presented by ten different universities from the US, Europe and Asia at the June ECTC in San Diego.