The 11th. Topical Meeting on Electrical performance of Electronic Packaging (EPEP) was held from October 21-October 23, 2002 in held in Monterey, California. The meeting provides a forum for the presentation and discussion of the latest advances in the electrical design, analysis and characterization of on chip and of chip package interconnections and structures covering all the application families and frequency ranges namely, digital, RF, microwave and mm-wave applications. EPEP is co-sponsored by the MTT and CPMT societies of the IEEE.

The afternoon of October 19, before the start of the conference, the second annual workshop, sponsored by the IEEE CPMT Society, "Future Directions in IC and Package Design", had record attendance of 50 participants from all over the world. A. Deutsch of IBM Corp. and M. Swaminathan of Georgia Institute of Technology chaired this meeting that had six excellent international invited speakers from the US, Europe, and Asia, that were divided into two sessions chaired by Tawfik Arabi of Intel Corp. and Prof. Andreas Cangellaris of University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. The first three speakers addressed high-end processor and package design issues. The second session covered tools and technology development needs and projections. The workshop was open to all EPEP conference attendees free of charge.

The EPEP meeting this year was organized into eleven sessions of oral presentations and one open forum (poster) session for one-to-one discussions. The papers represent 12 countries (Switzerland, Poland, Belgium, Finland, Korea, Taiwan, Japan, Canada, Italy, Germany, China, and USA). The meeting began with a keynote speech titled " Giga-Hz, Giga-bit, and Giga-Transistors" by Dr. Bill Siu, Vice President and General Manager, Desktop Platforms Group, Intel Corporation. Dr. Siu addressed the challenges posed to the packaging community by the rapid advancements in silicon technology. He postulated that the power removal and power delivery problems could no longer be solved with innovations in packaging alone. Instead, he encouraged the packaging community to look at the platform as a closed loop system and seek solutions at the architecture, circuit, package, and platform levels. The keynote address was followed by a special session for design issues of synchronous interfaces that are used widely for interchip connections in digital systems. The remaining ten sessions were dedicated to System Design and technology, Power Distribution design and Noise, RF/Microwave, Electromagnetic Issues, Modeling, Transmission Lines, Measurements, On chip Issues (that mainly cover I/O circuit design, clock net design and analysis, and electrical parameter extraction), and Interconnection macromodeling.

On Sunday October 20, five short courses were offered prior to the start of the meeting. The tutorials were given by well-known experts in their fields and covered wide variety of relevant topics including High-Speed Digital Interconnect Measurements, I/O circuit design, Power Supply system design and analysis, Electrical Interconnect and Package Modeling, and an introduction to RF design issues.

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. Each award consisted of laptop and $2500 cash. A total of 16 papers competed for these awards. The best student award sponsored by IBM Corp. was given to Mr. Dharmendra Saraswat, a student at Carleton University, Canada for his paper titled " A Fast Algorithm and Practical Considerations For Passive Macromodeling of Measured/Simulated Data". Dr. Moises Cases representing IBM presented this award. The best student paper award sponsored by INTEL Corp. was given to Mr. Erdem Matoglu, a student at Georgia Institute of Technology for his paper titled "Efficient Statistical Analysis and Diagnosis of High Speed Source Synchronous Interfaces". Dr. Tawfik Arabi representing INTEL Corp. presented this award.

A reception of the students hosted by IBM and INTEL was held on Tuesday October 22 that provided the opportunity to the students to get to discuss package design issues of interest.

In addition, the meeting hosted eight exhibits. Companies represented included: Ansoft, Apache Design Solutions, Applied Simulation technology, GigaTest Labs, Georgia Institute of Technology, Optimal Corporation, Sigrity, and TDA Systems.

A special issue in CPMT transactions based on the paper version of the presentations at this 11th EPEP meeting will be edited by DR. Tawfik Arabi of Intel and Dr. Michel Nakhla of Carleton University.

George Katopis; IBM Tawfik Arabi; Intel
Michel Nakhla; Carleton University Regional Chair
Meeting Co-Chairs