President's Column -- Prof. Rao Tummala

IEEE CPMT viewed as one of the best IEEE Societies

IEEE Technical Activity Board ( TAB) of IEEE recently reviewed our CPMT Society as well as a number of other IEEE Societies. The following is a summary of this review for our Society.

1. Overall CPMT is a very well managed and dynamic Society. The Society Review
Committee thanks the Society and Prof. Rao Tummala for an excellent
presentation about the Society's past and future plans.
2. They are impressed with the effort to develop strategic direction and
with the appointment of Strategic Directors in Regions 8 and 10 to focus on
specific activities.
3. The IEEE TAB likes positive directions of CPMT Society such as membership,
subscriptions, subscription rates, global conferences, recruitment, and
educational programs.

4. They suggest that candidates standing for election or persons accepting
committee assignments be informed of the time required to actively
participate.

The TAB indicated that they would like to see the best practices being implemented by CPMT to be used by other Societies such as establishment of on-going strategy focus and the slide presentation used by Prof. Tummala at the TAB review.

CPMT continues and advances its globalization focus

CPMT continues to make outstanding progress in its globalization. Better than 40% of the Society's membership comes from outside the US. The board membership from outside US continues to grow as well. Plans are underway to further improve both.
The most noteworthy activity during the last three months has been the leadership meetings in Regions 8 and 10; in Kaohsiung, Taiwan and in Singapore in December and in Berlin, Germany in January. The intent of these regional leadership meetings, typically attended by about 10-20 regional leaders, is to identify and attract leaders who are willing to develop CPMT programs in conferences, education, publications and membership for the benefit of the region.
The board members who contributed greatly to the success of these leadership meetings include Paul Wesling, who acted as the overall coordinator for Region 10 meeting, and Jim Morris, CP Wong, and Bill Chen, the Strategic Director for Asia. A similar leadeship meeting led by Rolf Aschenbrenner, the Strategic Director for Europe, Johan Liu, Jim Morris, Tony Chan, and CP Wong was successful as well. This leadership had two milestones: a face- to- face discussion with Europen IMAPS leaders that included Peter Barnwell ( North American IMAPS President), Karel Kurtzweil, the IMAPS Europe President, Eric Beyne, the 2005 IMAPS Europe Conference General Chair and Soren Norlying and Paul Collander, the IMAPS Nordic executives, These discussions led to the formation of CPMT- IMAPS committee to review, discuss and propose collaborative programs between the two Societies for the benefit of Europe.
The second milestone is an Emerging Technology Workshop sponsored by CPMT Society , organized by Rolf Aschenbrenner, with such emerging technology topics as Nano-packaging, Bio-packaging, conductive adhesives, and flipchip with underfill, was attended by more than 60 technologists from throughout Europe.

CPMT Embarks on Nano-Packaging as its Next Frontier

CPMT believes Nano-packaging to be the next frontier both at IC level and systems level. To realize its potential, CPMT is proposing a First International Workshop on Nano-packaging to be held in March 2004. Please see the call for abstracts in this Newsletter.