Successful EPEP in Boston

Another successful EPEP (Electrical Performance of Electronic Packaging) meeting took place in Boston this year. The meeting was well attended, considering the world event situation, with 143 registrations and over 110 people in attendance for most of the 11 sessions that started on Monday, October 29 and lasted until Wednesday October 31. During these sessions we had 45 excellent presentations on all issues affecting the performance and modeling of packaging structures. In addition, a poster session containing another 33 presentations was available during the Monday evening in parallel with the customary EPEP reception.

As usual the EPEP was a very interesting checkpoint of the progress of academia in key packaging areas as well as the industry's experience and application of the design and measurement tools to solve design problems of packaging structures or to characterize its electrical properties. This meeting is co-sponsored by the MTT and CPMT societies of the IEEE. The afternoon of October 27, before the start of the conference, a newly organized workshop, fully funded by the CPMT Society, "Future Directions in IC and Package Design", had record attendance of 80 participants. A. Deutsch and M. Swaminathan chaired this meeting that had six invited speakers from the US and Europe. The workshop was open to all EPEP conference attendees free of charge.

On Sunday, October 28, four tutorials were given by experts in the field. The keynote address of this year was delivered by Dr. Eric Kronstadt of IBM Corporation addressing "A Future view of Server Systems," and it was informative and motivational for the needs of the packaging community. Furthermore, the key issue of the present time, namely, the ever increasing power of microprocessor chips was addressed in a special session organized by T. Arabi of Intel Corporation with invited speakers from Intel, IBM, and Motorola. The most striking thing of these three presentations was the unanimity of their conclusions.

The regular session had the usual high caliber and quality of papers in all areas that are presented in a single track in this conference, namely, RF/Microwave, Transmission Line Modeling, Power Distribution, EM Modeling, Model Order Reduction, Power Decoupling, System Design, Measurement, and System Component Modeling.

Once again special attention was paid to graduate student attendees of this meeting with the presentation of Intel and IBM Corporation awards to the two most outstanding papers authored by graduate students. There were 11 entries and the winners were Mr. Y. C. Pan of Illinois University (IBM award) and Mr. P. Gunupudi of Carleton University, Canada (Intel Award).

This year Alina Deutsch and M. Cases launched another new activity focused on graduate students -- a reception of the students by IBM that provided the opportunity to the students to get to know key technical leaders, the IBM Corporation, and discuss package design issues of interest. This reception was well attended by 16 students.

Finally, the co-chairs of this meeting, Dr. John Prince of University of Arizona and Mr. George A. Katopis of IBM will be editors of a special issue in CPMT transactions based on the paper version of the presentations at this 10th EPEP meeting.

-- Submitted by George A. Katopis