For the June 2004 Newsletter

CPMT Society member CHARLES A. (Bud) ELDON is a former President of the IEEE - the only CPMT Member who has served as President. He is also a CPMT Society Past President. He was elected as an IEEE Fellow in 1987 for contributions to the manufacture of high-quality electronics components and systems. As a former IEEE President, the CPMT newsletter team interviewed him to hear about his experiences as an IEEE President, overseeing one of the world's largest and most prestigious technical societies for engineers. He shares his experience, vision, and contributions on IEEE globalization and various other aspects, such as engineering jobs outsourcing, IEEE Fellow standards, and international relations.

Bud also was the organizer of our Santa Clara Valley chapter, now the most active local CPMT chapter and winner of this year's "Chapter of the Year" award. Later he was a founder of CPMT itself within the IEEE. So the Newsletter asked him to share stories of the "old days": What motivated him to start the chapter? And what was the origin of CPMT?

Editor:
Tell us a bit about what it was like to be President of the IEEE.

Bud:
Being IEEE President surely was the greatest honor of my life, as well as an incredible experience. It also was a complete surprise - really a result of fate - because I never sought the position. What happened is that the man elected to be President-Elect in 1984 died early in the year. Under IEEE Bylaws, the Board of Directors is charged by themselves to elect a replacement, subject to subsequent membership approval. As the 1983 Executive VP (a position eliminated several years later), who had been elected by the entire membership, I was an obvious candidate and was chosen. Previously I'd been Director of Region 6, then IEEE Treasurer. Now I became the 1984 IEEE President-elect and thus the 1985 President.

Editor:
How did it get started, and where does "CPMT" come in?

Bud:
It all began with what has now become CPMT. The story: my boss, the VP-Manufacturing of HP, walked down the aisle, sat on my desk, and said, "Bill (Hewlett) wants us to start a chapter of the IRE Professional Group on Product Engineering and Production (PEP), here in the Bay Area, and we agreed that you should do that." To which I innocently replied, "What's IRE?" Explanation: as a physics major (but with mostly electronics courses), I hadn't been a member - didn't even know that Hewlett was a recent Past President. My boss laughed but assured me that joining IRE would be no problem - and a good idea. Need I add that I agreed immediately? I became an IRE member on 2/1/1955.

With the helpful guidance of past IEEE GM, Dick Emberson, I learned what was necessary to form a chapter. Then, after calling production engineers and production managers whom I knew in several Bay Area companies, I recruited enough volunteers to qualify. Is it a surprise that several became close friends, as well as helpful technical counselors? Together we started the San Francisco Chapter of the IRE's PEP Group in 1956. Paul Wesling was an early active member who has been serving the CPMT Society for numerous years, currently as the Society's VP of Publications.

At that time we all were concerned about how to make printed circuits. I was responsible for designing assembly and test systems for them, as well as for entire instruments, and for plastic molding, sheet metal fabrication and precision machining. A major concern was the quality and limited life of tubes (remember those?): transistors had been invented by then, but integrated circuits were not in use. PEP members shared experiences and solutions, just as they do nowadays

Then in 1963, when I'd been elected chairman of the PEP Group, and IRE was merging with AIEE, I was asked to consider how to reduce the number of technical units in the eventual IEEE. So I approached the chair of the IRE Components Group, Lew Kahn, about merging our Groups into an IEEE Society. We did it, forming what later came to be called CHMT (Components Hybrids and Manufacturing Technology), then CPMT.

Editor:
So what stands out in your mind about serving as IEEE President?

Bud:
As President in 1985 I was in the right place at the right time to help internationalize IEEE. Ten years earlier, IEEE had broken relations with the Popov Society of the USSR, because of IEEE leaders' opposition to the invasion of Afghanistan. Accepting an invitation to "the President of IEEE" to attend the 40th anniversary of the Popov Society and to discuss renewing relations, I went to Moscow with a plan to negotiate a written agreement that specified terms of quid pro quo: IEEE members from "the West" would receive identical treatment to that received by Popov visitors in our region. Most former exchanges had involved technical tours in the US or Europe by Popov parties, but no technical presentations or tours during IEEE visits to the USSR. The plan worked: a formal agreement was reached within a year; the IEEE Moscow Section was organized; many Russians have become IEEE members; and technical exchanges have continued since.

Negotiating agreements with non-US engineering societies has been a regular task for IEEE presidents, along with installing new Sections around the world. In 1985, a few of us went to Beijing to officiate at the opening of that Section, the first IEEE entity in the PRC. And "showing the flag" (a euphemism for traveling and making speeches) at IEEE Section meetings and conferences all over the world is an equally enjoyable honor - and an obligation.; so there was lots of that in 1985, too.

Editor:
What other IEEE issues involved your time?

Bud:
One issue during that period was the official IEEE-USA position about education of non-US engineers in US universities. IEEE-USA ("USAB" at that time) passed a resolution that all such graduates must "return home" immediately after receiving their degrees. Already approximately 50% of PhDs in engineering were being awarded to non-citizens. In addition, "outsourcing" of manufacturing was beginning to boom in Asia. Believing that their position was unfair, I sought support of past presidents and vice presidents of IEEE for a petition to USAB to change their resolution so that talented graduates would be encouraged to stay in the US, if they wished. They did, and that seems to have been to the ultimate benefit of everyone, although "outsourcing" now includes engineering jobs, too, partly as a result of some US-educated engineers "going home" to India, etc.

That issue in 1985 (and until last year) reflected industry's expressed need for more engineers than were available in the US. That need led to a perception among industry leaders in the US that IEEE had different goals. In an effort to resolve that perception, I invited the elected presidents of most US industry associations (AEA, EIA, ERA, SIA, et al) to a meeting. Eric Herz, our GM, invited his counterparts, the various staff directors, to join us. Everyone agreed to form an informal committee (the "No Name Committee") as a forum for sharing concerns and working together to deal with them. That committee was effective for several years, eventually formalized as the US Electronics Industry Forum. But IEEE presidents in the mid-1990s dropped it - an unfortunate mistake, in my opinion, because IEEE's relations with US industry have been an obvious and perplexing problem for many years.

Related to that issue has been my concern about IEEE recognitions, in particular the selection of IEEE Fellows. One of my predecessors as chair of the San Francisco Section in 1970 complained even then that outstanding industry engineers seldom were elected to Fellow Grade - that only professors and industry executives appeared to be anointed. That sad image continued. However, as chair of an ad hoc committee appointed by the past 3 IEEE Presidents, I saw the Board approval of changes in June, 2003 that will encourage explicitly the nomination of "Application Engineer/Practitioner" candidates, as distinct from either industry or academic "Research Engineers" - or "Educators" or "Leaders". That's a change that I believe will be particularly attractive to members of CPMT who are involved in Manufacturing Technology and Packaging, most of them in industry.

As part of my orientation in 1984 I sat in a meeting of the IEEE Long Range Planning Committee and discovered that it was a dumping ground for strategic matters that were either too complex or too controversial for the Board of Directors. That prompted me to introduce "strategic planning" during my term. With help from a Director who was also familiar with that activity from his work in Westinghouse, we wrote Bylaws approved by the Board to replace LRP with Strategic Planning, and I submitted the exact procedures and terminology that are still in use today. I believe it was a real contribution to IEEE.

Otherwise my term as IEEE President, like my previous assignments and my later service on the Board of the IEEE Foundation, was challenging but enormously rewarding. I'm truly grateful for the experiences and for the many friendships I've established.

Charles A. (Bud) Eldon, LF

Facts about Charles Eldon
Charles A. (Bud) Eldon currently lives in Sierra Vista, AZ with his wife Betty, his Stanford University undergraduate classmate. They are proud parents of 4 children (boy, girl, boy, boy) and now 7 grandchildren, the 2 oldest now students at Stanford.

He was raised in Hawaii thru high school. He left high school early to attend Stanford, got drafted into the Navy, and became an electronics technician. After discharge, he returned to Stanford for a BS in physics in 1948, followed by an MBA in 1950. He worked at Hewlett-Packard from January 1951 until April 1990, when he retired and moved from Los Altos, CA to Sierra Vista, AZ.

Charles A. (Bud) Eldon can be reached by email: b.eldon@ieee.org.