TC-12 Meeting Summary

TC-12, renamed as the Electrical Design, Modeling and Simulation (EDMS) technical committee was adjudged the best technical committee within the CPMT society. The committee was recognized for its technical contributions through a Special Presidential Recognition award at ECTC '03, held in New Orleans in May '03. The award was given by the CPMT President Rao Tummala and received by the TC-12 chair Madhavan Swaminathan on behalf of the EDMS committee.
Like previous years, the committee meeting was held this year just before the Topical Meeting on Electrical Performance of Electronic Packaging (EPEP) on Oct. 25, 2003 in Princeton, New Jersey. Though the meeting started late at 7:30pm and continued until 10:30pm, it was very well attended with around 30 attendees. These included both the committee and non-committee members.
EDMS is the technical sponsor of four CPMT conferences and workshops, which include EPEP, SPI (Signal Propagation on Interconnects), FDIP (Future Directions in ICs and Packages) and EDAPS (Electrical Design and Packaging of Systems). These conferences span three important regions in the world namely, America (EPEP, FDIP), Europe (SPI) and Asia (EDAPS). In addition, EDMS also sponsors the modeling and simulation sub-committee at ECTC.
Every year, the chairs provide an update on each of the conferences. Flavio Canavero (Univ. of Torino), provided an update on SPI, which was held in May '03 in Sienna, Italy. This workshop received special visibility from CPMT this year due to the attendance of Rao Tummala, CPMT President (who gave a keynote talk on System on a Package Technologies) and Paul Wesling, CPMT Vice President (who gave a luncheon talk on the society). The workshop was held in the picturesque Tuscany region of Italy and was very well organized, thanks to the efforts of Flavio Canavero, Ivan Maio, Grivet Talocia and Igor Stevieno who are with the University of Torino. After 3 years in Italy, the workshop will be moving back to Germany and will be held in Heidelberg in 2004. The workshop will be chaired by Hartmut Grabinski of the University of Hannover. Joungho Kim (KAIST) provided an update on EDAPS '02 and '03. In Dec '02, the first workshop was held in Singapore and was well attended with around 70 participants. This year, the workshop was held in Daejon, South Korea on KAIST campus on Nov. 10, 2003 soon after the Asia Pacific Microwave Conference. The workshop consisted of invited speakers from all over the world, including USA, Italy, Singapore and Japan. Having attended the workshop, the high point was the excellent hospitality provided by the host Joungho Kim of KAIST and his energetic students. The workshop was preceded by a tour of the Daejon area which included visits to the Buddhist temple and Korean folk village. The food provided was excellent and most of us added quite a few calories when we were there. Following the workshop, a tour of KAIST was organized as well. Tawfik Arabi (Intel) provided an update on EPEP, which is the premier conference on electrical design within the CPMT society. The paper quality was excellent this year and the conference was well attended by experts from both industry and academia. EPEP is unquestionably the pride of EDMS and the CPMT society. George Katopis (IBM) provided an update on the Electrical and Modeling sub-committee within ECTC. The sessions organized by this sub-committee is becoming very popular within ECTC due to the technical quality of the papers. George encouraged the participants to submit more papers. Since the meeting was held soon after FDIP '03, no update was required for this workshop.
The high point of the meeting was an invited talk given by Evan Davidson, who retired from IBM recently. Evan, who is an expert on Systems Packaging, was encouraged to give a non-technical talk by Alina and myself. Evan obliged and gave a very interesting talk on the "Career for Electrical Engineers". The statistics he provided led to interesting discussions. On one of his charts he compared the salaries of mid-level engineers in San Jose, Beijing and Bombay. San Jose engineers salary was ~106K per year as compared to the salary in Bombay which was ~10X lower. The Beijing salary was slightly higher than Bombay. However, the skill level was the same everywhere, meaning that companies will look to moving jobs off shore unless there is an incentive to do so otherwise.
Though the attendees wanted to continue the discussion with Evan, we had to adjourn the meeting at 10:30pm since we had to prepare ourselves for EPEP next day, which started at 8:00am.

Alina Deustch and Madhavan Swaminathan, Co-Chair and Chair

Write-up provided by Madhavan who is currently in Chennai (India) on transit to Singapore.