Board Meets in Dallas

Thirty five of CPMTs most active volunteers met in Dallas on November 7 and 8th as your Board of Governors.
President Rao Tummala introduced the new slate of CPMT officers to the gathering: Phil Garrou is our new President, Rolf Aschenbrenner our new Vice President of Technology, and Ricky Lee our new Vice President of Conferences. (Figure from Left: Ricky Lee, Rolf Aschenbrenner, Naoaki Yamanaka)
Ralph Wyndrum
In addition, Rao thanked Ralph Wyndrum for his 11 years of serving on the Board of Governors. Ralph is now in charge of IEEE TAB (Technical Activities Board).
In response, Ralph commented that the CPMT Society looked mighty focused and full of momentum from the TAB vantage point. He mentioned that small IEEE societies are proving every bit as important as the larger ones due to their better focus and tighter link to their technology and industry. In contrast with 10 years ago, he is finding that most societies are managing their future well.
Ralph's goal is to drive operational management down to the local level. He believes that the right operational and strategic recommendations have been presented to IEEE and are gradually being adopted. This includes: (1) having a small board with finance and strategic skills, (decentralizing geographically if you want to globalize, (3) solving problems on the local division and industrial level, (4) driving any new policies down to the society or regional level that is appropriate, and (5) price services fairly so activities reflect true economics.
Ralph commented that in the future we need to use the emerging technologies to reinvigorate existing societies and not just use them as an excuse to start new societies. Members are not helped simply by fragmentation even if the some of the new fragments are exciting.
In his capacity for IEEE-USA Ralph has seen the ability to bring policy insight to congress by IEEE members grow enormously. For example, from having only 4 IEEE designated representatives report to congress or federal regulatory organizations (FAA, FCC) to having 275 volunteers.

Rao suggested that three topics be given strategic discussion before the normal board decisions be performed. In particular, he wanted discussions on Membership, Emerging Technology, and Gobalization/conferences.
Membership
Ralph Russell and Paul Wesling lead a discussion on membership to CPMT on Friday night. It was pointed out that membership is declining in IEEE and in most professional societies as well as in CPMT. This seems to be partly due to the tough economic times for technology companies. Fewer companies pay the dues for their engineers to join. Unemployed engineers don't join. A second trend is that the source of components, packaging, and electronics manufacturing is now global, and no longer concentrated in countries with a history of professional society participation. A third force is the Internet where any engineer can access much information without any membership barriers.
Ralph mentioned that although if you are lobbying congress it is powerful to say you represent 300,000 engineers, raw numbers of members to CPMT are not as important as the number of attendees to our conferences and the number of papers submitted to our transactions. It is not clear to the average engineer what the benefits to CPMT membership are when they can attend our conferences and read our publications already.
A survey of board members was performed to sample motivations for being members. Mentioned were: profession development opportunities, easier networking with experts, chance for recognition and awards from peers, service to our profession to perpetuate the good received, and ready access to R&D results. However, several people at the top of our profession were mentioned who had never joined CPMT or IEEE and yet had all these benefits. Many mentioned that you need about 1000 fairly active volunteers to put on the scope of meetings and publications that CPMT owns but the 10,000 others that are attendees, presenters, authors, or readers do not necessarily have to be members to reap rewards.
Suggestions:
1. publish "directory of members" for members only - to help networking
2. have open meetings but make pitch about CPMT and how to join
3. Find out why BSEEs tend not to join
4. continue to have CPMT stress industrial members even though academic volunteer more in our society
5. establish web learning courses free for members
6. establish "members-only" web areas with meeting reviews, keynote presentations, issue specific chat rooms, basic tutorials

Emerging Technology
Phil Garrou lead the discussion on the CPMT strategy for emerging technology. Paul Wesling indicated that the publication area occasionally stumbles with a fast growing new technology and does not find a guest editor who "knows where the emergent bones are buried." Some areas such as Green Electronics and System on a Package arise suddenly everywhere and get much coverage in many societies. (figure from left: Phil Garrou, John Segelken, Ron Gedney, Merrill Palmer)
Ron Gedney mentioned that we do well on pertinent technologies over the long run with our transactions and our established meetings, but we are not nimble with timely workshops on the hot new areas. Most organizers think the IEEE system can not do a workshop with 3 months notice (it can) and so they seek some other help. It was suggested that we have a one page form for new technology workshops that quickly gets reviewed and turned over to an established workshop administration group.
Much discussion of having one day meetings at airport hotels to encourage last minute attendance decisions. Another possibility is to hold the workshop as part of a normal chapter meeting to guarantee local participation. Merrill Palmer suggested locating workshops near the center of the emerging activity.
Examples of emerging technologies include printed electronics, packaging the new ICs with copper and low-K dielectrics, bio-medical sensors/packaging, reliability of lead free (whisker full) component contacts, RFID, integrated passives, high bandwidth packaging, and nanosystem assembly and packaging.
Rao Tummala pointed out that 25 papers have already been submitted to the new CPMT nanotechnology conference.
Currently many of the new technologies are introduced by sessions and short courses at ECTC. There was discussion on if ECTC should be longer to accommodate more emerging technologies or if this should be left to IEMT or ad hoc workshops.
Action: Everyone send in emerging topics with list of key active engineers in these areas. Particularly list those gaps in focus by the profession.
Globalization/conferences
Rolf Aschenbrenner lead a discussion on how to empower volunteers all over the world to hold meetings and be active in CPMT. Rolf pointed out that there are good examples of professional organizations that have a presence on all continents and offer the advantage of globally shared publications and meetings and yet are decentralized. That is each geographic area has its own rules/constitution, events, finances, and some publications. In contrast, for most non-USA members it looks like their full dues check is sent away never to return. This is the perception even though the flow of services my indicate the IEEE "subsidizes" many country members.
One action would be for CPMT to promote the "affiliate member" which would allow someone active in an engineering society of their own country to simply join CPMT/IEEE at a lower cost affiliate position. This may be the best approach in countries such as Japan where there are historically strong local professional societies.
A similar perception occurs when a local chapter in a country puts on a International meeting using CPMT as a sponsor. What real benefits come from the CPMT to justify the request to plan the meeting finances with a surplus to be used as Society seed money. Of course there are meeting advertisements put in the newsletter, transactions, and on the websites. In addition, the Society networking allows finding speakers and attendees. In addition Society subsidized Distinguished Lecturers are available for presentations.
Much discussion was held on specific meeting in Europe and Asia with more progress on adapting the specifics of each meeting history with the realities of remaining fiscally sound as a society.
This was clearly the most contentious of the subjects this year in CPMT. Most of the urgency is due to IEEE having to change its financial structure over the last few years. Many activities that were "free" must now be carefully analyzed on a cost-benefit basis. In particular, the push away from traditional paper transaction and proceedings to digital media is putting half of the future income of the society in question (it is a question that know one yet knows the answer). The other half of the income is from meetings and is mostly from the largest, ECTC. If the future is a handful of large meeting or a hundred small meetings spread around the globe, our society must figure out how to break even financially.

Society Business
The CPMT Society just created an IEEE Field Award in our area of expertise. Ralph Wyndrum strongly suggested that since this is the first year for the award that the Board should take special steps to make sure several highly qualified engineers are nominated. Several other Field Awards are being offered less often because of lack of good nominations. There are obviously plenty of long term contributors, but writing a nomination package is often not automatic so many qualified individuals are not submitted.
Steve Bezuk discussed the upcoming ECTC. There were 554 abstracts submitted this year compared to 426 in 2002 and 474 in 2003. There will be 39 presentation sessions, 2 poster sessions, and 14 professional development courses. The history with ECTC in Las Vegas indicates there will be a large attendance. Again the expectation is that only half the attendees will be from the US. Two special topics have been added: MEMS and Nanotech. A panel session of packaging ICs with Low K dielectric is planned. The Tech corner is expecting 70 displays. Intel is considering support for a best student paper award in Model/Simulation or Advanced Packaging. The Motorola graduate fellowship will again be awarded based on ECTC presentations.
Bill Brown discussed the status of CPMT student chapters. The natural growth at schools with a critical mass has already occurred resulting in 5 chapters: Georgia Tech, Romania, Hong Kong, Sweden-Chalmers, U of Arkansas. The ability to have several close universities form one chapter is not easy based on IEEE rules. Several new possibilities were discussed including San Jose. Bill showed the student chapter web pages that are accessible from the www.cpmt.org home page.
John Segelken, treasurer, showed many charts and tables that showed the society right on track with our annual budget. This means expenses of $1,921K with income of $1,699K resulting in a $222K deficit. Once again the biggest bite from our operating budget is the charge IEEE is making to balance their headquarters budget, of about $450K. There is general belief that the right budget discipline and the right payment for services are quickly being activated so there will be a most one more year of heavy taxation.
Tim Adams discussed the finalized web plans. The space the search engine functions over will be expanded. A business model is being constructed to justify Web page sponsorship. The volunteer resources are being updated. We are benchmarking our site to other equivalent sites.