ECTC Short Courses

Al Puttlitz and Larry Mann planned and executed another record setting ECTC Short Course day. Twelve half day courses were taught attracting 517 working engineers trying to gain an edge. The instructors included:

Pat Thompson, Motorola, "Chip Scale Packaging"
Sridhar Canumalla and Lawrence W. Kessler, Sonoscan, "Analytical Acoustic Micro-Imaging for Assessing IC Package Reliability"
Karl J. Puttlitz, IBM, "Eliminating Lead in Electronic Assemblies"
Jan Vardaman, TechSearch "Microelectronics Packaging & Interconnection - A Worldwide Perspective"
Ephraim Suhir, Lucent, "Fiber-Optics Strcutures: design for Reliability"
Tom Chung, FICTA Tech, "Wafer Scale Packaging"
Manos Tentzeris and Joy Laskar, Georgia Tech, "RF/Wireless Packaging: Status and Challenges"
Tony Mak, Dallas Semiconductor, An-Yu Kuo, Optimal Corp, "Thermal Management, Thermal/Thermomechanical Modeling, Packaging, and Reliability of Plastic IC Packages"
C. P. Wong, Georgia Tech, "Polymers for Electronic Packaging"
Michael Lebby, Intel Capital, and Bill Ring, Tycoelectroncis, "Optical Networking and Optoelectronics Components."

Here are some insights gained by one student of the last course. The courses are so rich that each person carries away their own list of nuggets to fuel their career:

Photonic Markets
* Telecom is now driving packaging and system electronics/photonics not the computer industry. This new leadership will last for 10 - 15 years.
* Hot needs for Telecom: tunable lasers, broad band amps, tunable filters, flat gain filters, low cost circulator, advanced optic modulator.
* Cost of moving a bit over 1 Kilometer has fallen 4 orders of magnitude in 20 years
* today's network bottlenecks are in the last mile to the home and in big high traffic routers
* In telecom MEMs mirrors are a nice short term option but too slow for the long haul
* Big push to go all optical - this would eleminate lots of interfaces and protocols that are used today to switch between electrical and optical many times.
* Photonic companies lack manufacturing automation and they are so busy they lack the time to work on automeation. 80% of their employees do manufacturing as a result.
* Big companies have trouble keeping innovators -- they leave for start-ups and then get bought up by big companies.
* VCSELs don't appear to be advantageous enough to displace edge emitters in the 1330 - 1550 nm range unless their are some price breakthroughs. Edge emitters seem aimed at the $5 target.
* Photonic components will grow from $8B to $27B by 2003. Photonics agenda: high volume manufacturing, passive alignment methods, automation, integration/monolithic, less testing, lower power consumption, using IC fab techniques, industry standardization.
* JDS Uniphase has bought up about 15 micro-optic companies since 1995 causing paranoic defensive purchases by other big companies. Are the valuations of small photonic companies sound? The market is the market.

RF Packaging
* 80% of Rf circuit area goes to passives -- embedding passives in layered circuits makes sense
* 10 cell phones were manufactured every second in 1999
* In future the larges volume production will be bluetooth standard.
* It is hard to put "radio on a chip" uless you change the architecture.
* Large signal Math models of Rf transistors are hard to measure and closely guarded by foundries since they are vital to design. Even 1 Watt handheld units need large signal models for design.
* As you try to shrink RF circuits you ruin "Q". Must use SAWs and MEMs in new architectures to keep Qs high.
* Commercial simulation tools fail with RF MEMs because they don't combine Maxwell and Mechanical equations.
* Patch antennas with dielectric etched out underneath are the most efficient.