Board Meets in New Orleans Jazz Bistro

Right after the successful ECTC, your hardworking Board of Governors spent all day Saturday planning and executing Society business. The Board now meets twice a year: at ECTC in June and at paper selection in Dallas in November. The officers also meet in winter in either Europe or Asia.

President Rao Tummala started the meeting by introducing the new volunteers. Tim Adams of Dow Corning is an appointed Member at Large who has taken on upgrading of the CPMT web pages as his focus. Ricky Lee of Hong Kong is a new Member at Large as well as being an associate editor of our transactions. David Whalley a Senior Lecturer Loughborough University in the United Kingdom. Li Li of Motorola is another new Member at Large. The new Chair of TC-6, high density boards, was also present at the meeting, Dr. Yoshitaka Fukuoka.

Representing the ECTC were current chair Donna Noctor and next year Chair Steve Bezuk. Potomac Communications were represented by Ellen Leeper, Kristine Martin, and Bob Conrad. Kimberly Newman of University of Denver was also visiting the board meeting.

Rao and Marsha Tickman had reviewed the state of CPMT to the TAB. This IEEE committee saw CPMT as a small dynamic Society with excellent management. In particular, they liked the way each part of CPMT focused on their regional membership. They wanted to document CPMT "best practices" so that other societies could more easily adopt them. One note of cautions was that as CPMT accepted new volunteers we should advise them as to the amount of time each task is expecting to take. The Board congratulated Rao and Marsha for the successful presentation.

Rao indicated that many issues had to be addressed at this meeting but two were critical: the updating of the CPMT and ECA agreement to run ECTC and the influence of debt ridden IEEE on CPMT finances.

Bob Willis, the President of ECA, explained the up-date of the controlling document for running the ECTC meeting. Now all the roles are well defined so that there is no confusion by the many players that come and go. The governing document discusses the "jointly and equally" run ECTC. In particular it defines the ECTC Governing Council that is responsible for all financial concerns of the meeting. This six person council has both the ECA and the CPMT President and main members. In practice the operations group, the ECTC Executive Committee, will suggest the solutions to each business concern and the Council will review and concur. The responsibilities include:
1. Manage all fiduciary responsibilities
2. Define all fixed costs
3. Define expected revenues
4. Approve the financial chair nomination
5. Approve the ECTC Vice Chair

These steps bring the needed transparency without putting hurdles in the way of an historically efficient operations. The Board approved this agreement in Principal.

Merrill Palmer sat in for the Treasurer since he is so good at keeping the Board from overspending. He pointed out that the bill for our Society from IEEE TAB + taxes have been on a roller coaster but is coming down to a low level by 2005.
1997 -- $29.7K
1998 -- $48.7K
1999 -- $39.3K
2000 -- $461.5K (the IEEE reserves go to zero)
2001 -- $1039.4K
2002 -- $383.7
2003 -- $535.9 IEEE expects at least $6.18 M in red ink this year.
Merrill expects the cost of services from TAB for the CPMT to run about $100K/year in the future. In addition to these IEEE bills we also saw CPMT reserves go down simply because our investments decreased in value for the last few years. The proposed Society budget does not balance in 2004 but goes a long way toward balance and must balance in 2005 as per our pledge to TAB. We will manage the deficit to $60K in 2004. The Board voted not to raise the members dues or Transaction fees despite the looming red ink.
Merrill points out that the Transactions bring in $802K with expenses of 365K for a surplus of $437K for Society operation expenses. About 1200 transactions go to libraries and 1800 go to our members (many members now use IEEExplore to read the transactions, not paper copies). Our Book Broker income has grown in 14 years from $8K to $215K. Our new CD-ROM with Transaction index and 2000-2002 is priced at $60 and should make a profit after the $26K of manufacturing has been recovered. We trust members will buy this CD-ROM to speed up searches of the packaging, component, and manufacturing references.

Vice President Phil Garrou summarized the technical activities in our Society:
19 active TCs
9 new Chairs in last 2 years, lots of turn over as people get overloaded
Nano-technology Packaging committee started
Assembly TC-3 is looking for new Chair
Our TC web site has been updated
But 6 TCs need to update their pages

Walt Trybula talked of the IEEE/CPMT presentation to the senate staffers on Nano-technology. He mentioned Deb Newberry on the team, the author of "The Next Big Thing Is Really Small: How Nanotechnology Will Change the Future of Your Business." This helped the deposition of the $2B bill in front of the U.S. congress. Large efforts were also mentioned in Japan, Europe, and China. There is a yet to be defined "Nano path" for everything CPMT does now on the micro level including: boards, systems in packages, systems on chips.

Tim Adams talked about upgrading the CPMT websites. His team wants to use the site as a strategic tool not just a bulletin board. The information presentation should lead to increased Society revenue by making services more available to members and non-members. Perhaps some of web information would be available to members to keep volunteer participation high. His plan includes:
1. Develop a unified web plan
2. Enhance the current search engine on our web pages
3. Develop a business model to allow Web sponsorship revenue
4. Update volunteer resources on the existing site - possibly senior, student, and fellow pages
5. Benchmark our sites with equivalent organizations

Vice President Anthony Chan mentioned the balance we have in the Society with strong reserves, diverse services, stable operations, and continual strategic planning. We are maturing in our global participation , professional in many related fields, and have had hundred of volunteers at any one time. However, the world technology economy is at the lowest profit margins ever. This provides CPMT with the opportunity to take leadership including training in this time of fast technology changes.

International relations. Bill Chan and Ricky Lee handle the Asian interactions. Bill pointed out that there is a transition underway from focus on Manufacturing to also doing product development and R&D in Asia. However, Asia was hit harder by the recent downturn with the possible exception of China. ASE has a large Asian presence and thinks CPMT is a premier organization. In all cases our Society must show how our meeting and journals can help industry increase their revenue. The regional meetings have been very successful. The Leadership Workshop held at EMAP was very successful.

Rolf Aschenbrenner and Johan Liu represent European activities. The European Leadership meeting was highly successful due to the heroic organization. Attendees included 25 from European CPMT chapters, 3 from the U. S. , and 6 IMAPS- Europe. The associated emerging technology workshop attracted 80 participants. The conclusion was that CPMT and IMAPS must cooperate in Europe for member benefits. In particular, we must coordinate meeting dates (there are too many meetings), mailing lists, and consider putting on one dual European conference. The agreement is in principle and will be worked out by volunteers in both groups.

C. P. Wong reported that the CPMT Fellows committee has 11 complete nomination packages that reach all of the IEEE criteria. This is the most every to be generated within the Society. This shows a high degree of activity by individual nominators and a team assembled by Jack Balde to achieve higher participation. Rao Tummala notes that there are still many potential candidates we have not focused on including many in the regions CPMT is growing membership. C. P. suggested that we continue to push Senior Ranking for our members since only about 8% have reached that rank and this is where the fellows come from. Once the CPMT committee adds comments and ranks the nomination packages they go for evaluation by the 30 members of the IEEE Committee. Announcements will be made in November.

A request was made for what it takes to be an "IEEE Life Member." The rules are that a members age plus years of IEEE membership must total 95. This membership level used to be left unbothered by IEEE renewal packages, but this year they were included and about half did not respond dropping the IEEE membership by 2%. For years our system forgot about an imperative even for engineers…we don't live forever.

Marsha pointed out that of the Board members on the last 6 months of there 3 year term, 4 are eligible to serve again. Nominations for these 6 Member at Large positions are due by July 18th. The slate will be posted by August 1.

Ralph Russell reported (by telephone). There are now 33 CPMT chapters all over the globe. Durham North Carolina has a new joint chapter approved by IEEE. The president of the Chapter is Dev Palmer. There were few submittals to "Chapter of the Year" award partly because it is a complex process. Ralph said the process is being simplified for next year. The Romanian Student Chapter is winning this year's award.

Our current membership at the end of April is 3,103 that is about equal to our membership in 1999. This is about 400 lower than our all time April membership. The loss is pretty much all around the globe and is probably related to the shrinking job market. Ralph also suggested that we encourage upgrading to senior status for more of our members since this level of membership usually is engaged so they automatically renew. In fact, senior members usually last until they become life members. Marsha pointed out that eight new members joined at the CPMT table during ECTC.

Steve Bezuk reported on the results of ECTC. With 726 attendees this was about the normal number and down from the all time record of 1000. Attendees were 46% from industry, 44% from universities, and 10% from research labs. The 14 professional development courses attracted 261 engineers and should make a surplus. There were 42 new exhibits compared with 70 last year. The academy workshop attracted 22 professors and should become a standard feature of the ECTC week. 474 abstracts were submitted up from 425 last year. 65% were university related, the university presence is rising which represents the increase of packaging/components taught in graduate school. There were 311 technical papers with 252 oral presentations (with 7 each session) and 59 posters. The mix of sessions is changing. Connectors and contacts have been phased out to be featured at the Holm conference of TC-1.

Vice President Al Puttlitz described the Motorola Fellowship. There were 13 applicants that met all the requirements. A down-selection was made to 7 finalists to present at ECTC. Five gave oral presentations and two poster sessions. The winner this year was Young-Doo Jeon from KAIST.

In addition, the CPMT list has been updated to 20. In 2003 Rao Tummala, Paul Wesling, C. P. Wong, and Paul Totta have used the travel budget. The next year Professional Development courses will include a (1) nano overview, (2) nano packaging, (3) MEMS.

Prof. Bill Brown described progress in student chapters. There are now 5 official chapters: Georgia Tech, Romania Polytechnic of Bucharest University, Hong Kong Science and Technology, University of Arkansas, and Sweden. Next year we will try to have a tech corner booth for student chapters.

Vice President Jim Morris described the trend to get CPMT being a financial partner in all conferences we support. If we can't provide value we should not dilute our volunteer efforts. When we do provide value we should get some added to the CPMT surplus. We are making progress in negotiations with all conferences where we have long term commitments. Jim indicated the Packaging Materials Conference would start up again in 2004 in Atlanta. In 2005 the conference will go to Irvine California.

Rao Bonda discussed the successful CPMT awards this year. Next year we must find a way to get many nominations with minimum effort. In particular, the IEEE Field award that CPMT Society is initiating must have several nomination packages prepared from our membership.

Vice President Paul Wesling gave more updates on the Society publications. First we have to show that our publications have high impact. Since we have split and changed the name of our transactions a number of times the ISI reference tracking system hasn't been able to validate our journals. ISI does not want to combine references from our previous named transactions. Perhaps we should calculate our own citation index. A second service we will provide is lists of possible references (onlogies) for authors and editors since our articles do not have lots of references. A third effort is to solicit more papers from our membership. For example, we typically get 25 good papers from ECTC if session chairs follow up.

Paul also reported that the new CD for transactions from 2000-2002 is on sale for $60 and one can get all the transactions from 1954 on 10 CDs for $260.

John Stafford discussed the changing affiliation of our members. More packaging and assembly manufacturing and development are in the EMS companies. Traditionally these companies are not supporters of professional societies although their engineers often attend meetings and use publications on an individual basis. Here is an opportunity for CPMT to influence the culture of these growing part of the industry.