YOUR SOCIETY BOARD MEETS
Volunteers, 30 strong, descended on Newark Airport on October 3 to sort out the future of your Society. The high level of conference and publication activity makes the Board of Governors meeting a packed 8 hours.
Dennis Olsen reported that the CPMT 50th anniversary booklet is in draft form and is being reviewed by a number of people. Other than a few gaps in history, the job looks well in hand. This booklet will probably be one of the member benefits next year.
President John Stafford reported on IEEE procedure changes. Because of persistent budget problems IEEE is changing their cost recovery algorithms and trying to lower their costs. Most of the money is held by the 32 Societies since they hold the most meetings and publish the most papers. And like most bureaucracies, the staff size and budget of headquarters increases until members put on pressure. One request is that each society improve their profitability by 3%. The CPMT budget does just that. The IEEE services will try to begin using a system of "pay by the drink." However, this implies they will resize if they do not have enough drinkers, something that central offices fight. The new process eliminates allotments and entitlements in the budget so that working groups that are not funded by direct customers will have budget problems. However, despite the rhetoric, only 10% of the next year’s budget will be operated this way.
New Financial Model: Every part of the IEEE is to be divided into either a surplus or a costing center. The Societies are considered surplus centers with right to carry reserves. The direct impact on CPMT Society is not clear. Depending on the execution algorithms , our annual bill could be as low as $15K or as high as $300K. When you consider that at the top end this is about $100/member-year, one wonders if IEEE headquarters is located too near Washington DC. This lack of fiscal control was also pointed out with the unlimited expense accounts and ability to form new expensive activities that many of the IEEE board members have.
"Streaming" was discussed. The particular example used is when IEEE USA takes a public stand on an issue such as "Portable pension," many citizens think this is a stand of all of IEEE and not just that of the governing board of the USA group. This is probably an issue because of some of the very contentious issues recently (H1B immigration bill) that have various members and companies on both sides. None-the-less it is important to know how IEEE should take a public stand on issues.

Branding: The IEEE Logo and the letters "IEEE" have lots of value when used as a mark of quality for a book or conference. Apparently the Governing Board of IEEE hired consultants to the tune of $700K to make variations on the Logos. All variations shown appeared worse than today’s in the eyes of your board. Our vote was to stick with tradition and just standardize the location and size of these Logos on all our documents and web pages. Apparently the "IEEE" is a trademark in the USA and is being registered throughout the world.
Vice President Rao Tummala announced that our new Technical Committees had been successfully integrated into the existing ECTC Technical Committees and were actively selecting papers for the next conference. Tom Reynolds pointed out that ECTC would begin reaching 1000 in attendance with these new topics to we must think about more consecutive speaker sessions or more days of meeting. The number of facilities that can handle >1000 attendees was also smaller than the 500-800 range we had to date.
VP Paul Wesling discussed the ECTC grants won at last ECTC for on-line educational program development for our members. Five grants of $30K were awarded based on their competitive proposals and papers. In 1998 three grants were given. It is anticipated that 4 or 5 will be granted in Las Vegas at ECTC-2000. An educational server for CPMT members is being developed and will be active by winter. At first the service will be free to all members but eventually there will be charges so that this service will pay for new web based training to be developed.
Gerald Witter, Chair of TC-1 Electrical Contacts, reviewed the Electrical Contact course given in June in Milwaukee. Twenty seven were schooled. The next year’s course will be held in Montreal. Gerald also announced that long time CPMT TC-1 volunteer, Mort Antler, had passed on. The Holm Conference was about to start in Pittsburgh with 130 advanced registrations. The CD-ROM of TC-1 Holm proceedings is underway and expected to ship by the end of this year.
Tom Reynolds, Chair of TC-2 Components, reminded everyone to get their abstracts into the ECTC by October 15.
Rajen Chanchani, Chair of TC-5 Materials, described the progress made in getting CPMT and SCR to find common ground in supporting the maintenance of the CINDAS electronics material database at Purdue and distributing it as a CD-ROM to CPMT/SCR members. This database is underutilized even by SCR members today because it is not widely known and distributed.
Anthony Chan, VP of Administration, pointed out that TC-9 will soon have a "Stress Testing" book released by the IEEE Press.
Tony Mak, Chair of TC-9, explained that 14 active members are participating in SEMITherm and Itherm meetings. This year there is a special focus on European activities.
Michael Lebby of TC-10 discussed the informal workshop held in September on micro-optics packaging. This was a CPMT/LEOS event which needed 61 people to break even. 170 attended resulting in a surplus of $10K for CPMT conference budget. He mentioned that DARPA is out of general support of electronic packaging and is only involved in specific product packaging.
Phil Garrou, Chair TC-18, discussed the group of 30 members working on wafer level packaging and testing. This is a hot topic with many wafer fabs. The CPMT Transactions of November will have a section with 9 articles covering this topic.
Intersociety Liaison Chair, Bill Chen, discussed the 50,000 member ASME. Their Electronic Packaging unit has 1200 primary interest members and 2400 secondary interest. However only 500 members subscribe to their Journal of Electronic Packaging. Part of this is because of the analytic mathematical approach it emphasizes. They are interested in the mechanical and thermal properties of the packaging. They are considering a new MEMs subdivision. CPMT participates in several conferences and publications jointly with ASME and intend to cultivate this overlap.
Jack Balde, Chair of Standards, brought the meeting to a frenzy with his description of a proposal to the international standards group to drop the use of the term "voltage" from publications. See article in September Newsletter for details.
Anthony Chan, Administrative VP discussed how your Board of Governors could use the web more effectively to cope in the fast changing world that CPMT must inhabit.
Ralph Russell announced that the Santa Clara CPMT Chapter had won the "Chapter of the Year" Award. He also discussed the need for a multimedia CD-ROM or other format that would make contacting the executives of companies about CPMT a lot easier.
George Harman, Chair of the Fellows committee, urged all members to start preparing any Fellow application forms now. This year’s winners will be announced in November, and CPMT should have a good showing, but with more applications there would be more members becoming Fellows of the Institute. Since each application needs references from existing Fellows, we will list all Fellows that have some association with CPMT so can appreciate your contributions best. However, any Fellows can be references as long as they know your work.
John Segelken, Chair Nominations Committee, stated that the ballots are out for the election of the next bevy of Members at Large. These individuals will serve 3 years on your Board of Governors.
Al Puttlitz summarized the short courses at the last ECTC and announced those for the meeting in Las Vegas. He pointed out that last time $92K in surplus was made and that this resulted in one third of the whole ECTC profits. He is looking for a new volunteer to run the short course business.
The Board had another in a series of arguments into whether it is the right time to buy the computer projectors or just to rent them until the price comes down and the ruggedness goes up. The decision was to rent and wait. If you have an opinion, please send it in.
n Dave Palmer, editor