Board Retreats to Phoenix for Winter
Thirty stalwart CPMT volunteers braved the 70F weather in Phoenix for your Board of Governors meeting on February 4 and 5. The theme of this meeting was "preparing a Society strat-egy with rapid business and technology changes."

Business meeting
Vice President Albert Puttlitz mentioned that 420 abstracts were submitted for the Las Vegas ECTC. Of these 306 were chosen; there will be 6 concurrent sessions to handle this infor-mation flow. Potential candidates for the Motorola/CPMT graduate fellowship provided 19 of the papers. The education committee will down select to 7 papers for the presentation competition held at ECTC. The "Technology Corner" already has 50 companies signed up. One of the new themes of this meeting is "wireless packaging".
Vice President Paul Wesling set the stage for the future for CPMT publications. He sees the Internet as both a threat to our traditional publication methods and an opportunity to invent new methods that serve our members much better. He used three ex-amples:
The new web based peer review system for CPMT transaction papers (OPRS) will not only speed the many stepped process by removing both time enroute and time en-pile, but will also be transparent so that authors, editors, and reviewers can trace an article with ease. No more lost or way laid precious manuscripts.
Web archives of CPMT publications. CPMT has contributed for a few years to the IEEE "OPERA" on-line publication search engine. Now IEEE is expanding the system to include all articles back to 1988 with a new data base called XPLORE.
The Newsletter has had an on-line version for several years. The web version will become the main Newsletter with archival volunteer information as well as monthly news updates.
However, no one knows the rate with which CPMT engineers will embrace this more efficient publication format; we engineers have habits with deep roots.
Ralph Russell, Chair of Chapter and Membership develop-ment, reports that CPMT has 31 chapters with potential for im-mediate expansion in Greece, India, France, Israel, and Swit-zerland. Our Society growth has been in areas of the world where packaging and component manufacturing are expanding. He pointed out that in 1999 the whole IEEE grew at 5.2% mostly outside of North America. During this period our Society decreased in size by 1.7% even as the number of volunteers for meetings and publications increased. Ralph is accepting appli-cations for "Chapter of the Year". Ralph suggested we hold a survey of our members to see what benefits they utilize now and which they hope for in the future.
Jim Morris, Vice President of Conferences, announced a gathering of CPMT Conference Chairs during Tuesday evening of the ECTC meeting. Some discussion of "virtual conferences" occurred. Is there something we could offer with the Internet that serves between the traditional, time-demanding face-to-face conference and today’s alternative of non-interactive reading of old conference proceedings? One answer was suggested. Have keynote and invited presentations on the CPMT web site in the form of streaming audio with viewgraph visuals.
Jim described newly approved CPMT support for meetings: Berlin Electronics, IMAP2000 in Hong Kong, and the Bing-hamton BGA/SCP 2000 meeting. The IEMT symposium after several years in Austin will now be held in Santa Clara where it will be co-located with the SEMI Packaging Equipment show. The successful series of EPEP meetings will now have CPMT as a 50/50 sponsor with the MTT Society. There is a request for CPMT to insert more electronics into the highly suc-cessful Interpak meetings held with ASME. An RF & Wireless packaging session was one suggestion. The power packaging IWIPP meeting will have CPMT as a 50/50 partner with the Power Society.
Merrill Palmer, CPMT Treasurer, reported that the IEEE books on 1999 had not been closed because the deficit run by IEEE headquarters has lead to negotiations for our CPMT re-serves created by our sacrifices. In particular, our last year’s investment income has been frozen. Using traditional society budgeting it looks like we came through last year with a bit extra ECTC income which offset various expenses for initiatives not considered in the original budget.
John Segelken, Chair of Awards, mentioned that five new Fellows were named from our CPMT ranks. Deadline for nomi-nations this year is March 15.
Phil Garrou, Technical Vice President, announced some TC chair changes. Tim Lenihan will now run TC-2 on Discrete and Integral Passive Components. Dan Baldwin of Georgia Tech has taken over TC-3 on IC and Package Assembly. Walt Trybula of SEMATECH is chairing TC-4 on Manufacturing Design & Processing. Lisa Pallotti chairs Systems Packaging, TC-14. TC-18, Wafer Level Packaging, is now chaired by Luu Nguyen of National Semiconductor. A new technical committee has been created, TC-22 Contract Manufacturing.
Chair Rajen Chanchani reported on TC-5. He has succeeded in negotiating the release of the Packaging Materials Database, CINDAS. Purdue University is deciding on the terms for IEEE members and the value that CPMT can add to the distribution or presentation of the database.
RF & Wireless Packaging Chair Craig Gaw announced that Manos Tentzeris of Georgia Tech is setting up a workshop for the year 2000. In addition, ECTC2000 has attracted a number of RF component presentations. There was some discussion of so-liciting RF talks for the upcoming Indian Wells spring packag-ing workshop.
There was an intense discussion on strategies for globalization. About 25% of CPMT members live outside of North America and that has been reflected in the Board of Governors members’ geographic distribution. However, possible changes to CPMT constitution were discussed with an intent to facilitate global representation. -- editor