8th TOPICAL MEETING ON ELECTRICAL PERFORMANCE OF ELECTRONIC PACKAGING
The 8th Topical Meeting on Electrical Performance of Electronic Packaging (EPEP) was held at the Catamaran resort in San Diego from Oct 25 - 27, 1999. It was a very successful meeting this year with 48 oral presentations, 12 poster papers and more than 185 people attending the meeting.
EPEP provides a forum for the presentation and discussion of the latest advances in electrical design, analysis and characterization of on-chip and packaging interconnections and structures for digital, mixed signal, RF, microwave and mm-wave applications. The meeting is aimed at bringing together researchers and practicing engineers from industry, universities and government laboratories from around the world to address all current and future issues affecting the electrical performance of high-speed electronic systems.
The meeting consisted of two keynote talks in the plenary session given by Jim Meindl (Georgia Tech) and Andy Piloto (Kyocera America). Jim's talk was on "Interconnect Limits on Gigascale Integration" where he described the activities of the Interconnect Focus Center. Andy's talk was entitled "Electronic Packaging for Microwave Multichip Modules" where he described the design methodology for microwave modules at Kyocera. In addition, seven invited talks addressed important topics, such as on-chip wiring design challenges, on-chip power distribution, simultaneous switching noise, on-chip interconnect modeling and microwave package modeling.
Eight short courses were also offered on the day prior to the start of the meeting. The tutorials were given by well known experts in the field and covered important topics such as interconnect design, measurements, modeling, characterization and power distribution. The second day also included a
tour of Kyocera's ceramic facility which was attended by 70 participants.
Two best paper awards were offered this year which were sponsored by Intel Corporation and Kyocera. A total of 10 students competed for this award which was decided by a committee chaired by Tawfik Arabi and Peter Tirkas. The outstanding paper award (first prize) which was sponsored by Intel was awarded to Karen Coperich from the University of Ilinois for her paper entitled "Enhanced Skin Effect for Partial Element Equivalent Circuit (PEEC) Models". Her co-authors were Albert Ruehli and Andreas Cangellaris. The best paper award (second prize) which was sponsored by Kyocera was awarded to James Becker from University of Michigan for his paper entitled "Toward a Novel Planar Circuit Compatible Silicon Micromachined Waveguide". His co-author was Linda Katehi. Congratulations, Karen and James on an outstanding
performance. Thank you Intel and Kyocera for the awards.
This year we have two special issues based on EPEP `99 in the IEEE MTT and CPMT transactions. The guest editors are Alina Deutsch and Madhavan Swaminathan for CPMT and Madhavan Swaminathan and K.C.Gupta for MTT. The manuscript due dates for both issues is Jan 15, 2000.
The high point of the meeting was a Luau dinner banquet on the second day. Many attendees participated in the dancing which created a very informal atmosphere for the meeting. Thank you Paul Baltes for making this happen. During the banquet awards were given to Dale Becker, Moises Cases, Ken Lee, Tawfik Arabi, Chong Park and Alina Deutsch for their contributions to EPEP. A special recognition award was also
presented to Gnanalingam Arjavalingam (Ari) on the last day. Ari was one of the founders of EPEP when he was at IBM. Thank you Ari for having the vision to create EPEP.
I would like to thank my co-chair Ravi Kaw, invited speakers, authors, presenters, tutorial instructors and technical program committee members for their contributions in making EPEP `99 a grand success. I also would like to thank the IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society and the IEEE Components, Packaging and Manufacturing Technology Society for their sponsorship.
My two year term as Co-Chair of EPEP has come to an end. John Prince will be replacing me for a two year term. My sincere best wishes to Ravi and John for the next year.

¨ submitted by Madhavan Swaminathan, Co-Chair EPEP `99