Technical Committees Meet at ECTC

MEMs and Sensor Packaging
On Wednesday morning the MEMs & Sensor Packaging TC-17 had a nine member meeting chaired by Eric Jung. One action item was the restarting of the TC Newsletter. One function would be to send out each quarter a list of conferences and meetings that would be of interest to members. There was some discussion of linking the electronic Newsletter to the "MEMS clearing house" Internet site.

In addition to lists of upcoming meetings, it would benefit members if there were reviews of recent meetings and recent articles in the Newsletter. Most engineers miss most meetings and articles in a fast moving field so having brief summaries could be a real service to members.

There was much discussion on whether the ECTC was the right conference for MEMs/ Sensor packaging. The international participation and breadth of companies present was encouraging. In addition ECTC has been the telecommunications opto-electronics packaging meeting for almost 10 years. Since industry is beginning to embrace many MEMs products, this may be the right time to solicit a session at next year's ECTC. However, as always, as the component becomes the system the specialization reaches the point where presentation at any meeting may be difficult.

An annual special IEEE CPMT transaction on MEMs packaging seems possible. Last year the special issue stemmed mostly from papers given at an ASME conference. The TC home page must be redone in the new software. Rolf Aschenbrenner reminded the group that often the solution to MEMs packaging was Wafer level packaging and we should coordinate with the WLP TC for sessions and transactions. This led to a suggest that we create a list of all MEMs devices that need packaging so we can categorize the packaging to better balance sessions and transactions.

Thermal
On Wednesday (June 2) evening Tony Mak chaired the Thermal Management and Thermal Mechanical Design TC (from left Goran Matijasevic, Kouchi Zhanag, and Tony Mak). Because of the ongoing activities at the ITherm meeting that was being held about a kilometer away at the Mirage Hotel, attendance was limited to ECTC participants.

It was mentioned that the European thermal conference received 140 papers and ITherm was having a healthy attendance. Another transaction special issue was planned so this TC must pick about 7 papers to represent advances across the Thermal front. The TC home pages are currently on a server computer at Vanderbilt University and a graduate student in thermal studies was recommended as the new web master. A new editor for the TC Newsletter is needed and several suggestions were made.

Editors
Vice President Paul Wesling had the belief that he would get a turn out of editors if he had the earliest meeting of the conference. His breakfast meeting started at 6:30am. He was right; at least 13 showed up. There was much discussion of the citation index and how our CPMT grade can be improved by: (1) not changing the name of the publications again, (2) turning the articles around faster since only articles sited within 2 years of their publication really count, (3) growing stronger as the place active engineers in the area want to publish, and (4) presenting authors with a list of previous published articles from which their work flowed so their references would be more complete. Being volunteer-run puts our transactions in a disadvantage in editing turn around time.

Paul gave a description of the method he would start to creating "ontologies." These lists of publications in each area of interest to CPMT would allow an author quick access to the original references for each of the chains of technology used in their article.

Avram Bar-Cohen then gave a presentation on converting the existing ISI index rating to one that would have happened had we not changed the transaction title and lost the trail in ISI software.

there was much discussion of the good and bad of manuscript central. Apparently it is possible for a paper reviewer to not realize there are articles waiting for review. It is also possible for editors to not find the right reviewer for a subject based on the way Manuscript Central bins reviewers. Paul agreed to address these issues.

Materials TC

Also on Thursday Morning Rajen Chanchani held the Materials Technical Committee meeting. About 13 members were able to awaken after the previous late night session. Rajen held discussions on lining up papers for next years ECTC and for the annual Packaging Materials conference, this year to be held in Irvine California.

There was also a long animated discussion on the long time it could take to get something published in a CPMT transactions. It was decided that one person should be responsible for following a paper all the way though the system since the problem seems to be once it stops no one is responsible for finding it and getting it moving. Because of this universities have not submitted many papers to CPMT recently. They need publications to prove their worth in academia.

Rajen ended the meeting just before they lit torches and marched down to the editors' meeting.

RF and Wireless TC

Chair Craig Gaw of Free Scale Inc held a breakfast meeting on Thursday morning. Rolf Aschenbrenner, M. Iyer, Tom Reynolds, Len Schaper, Al Puttlitz, Manos Tentzeris, Li Li, and Dave Palmer attended. Craig reported that for this year's ECTC 70 abstracts were submitted which had RF or Wireless content. To make a bigger impact in this growing area we must attract even more papers.

To this end Craig requested that all members of the TC come up with a list of 5 other engineers in this area with a particular subject that they should submit a paper for next year's meeting. Each member should solicit on definite abstract that they submit in addition to many that they encourage. Tom Reynolds has agreed to make a mailing list of all those that have recently submitted RF papers to ECTC so we can encourage the most likely group to continue their support. Craig also will pen a special RF/Wireless ECTC solicitation like we did last year and Dave Palmer will place it in the CPMT Newsletter and Paul Wesling will place it in the Bay Area IEEE regional newsletter. We still need to fill in our key contacts in Companies and countries since our representation is growing but still spotty.

Themes for next year sessions were listed and voted on. The dominant ones appeared to be Integrated Passives for RF microsystems and component -like modules with RF fuctionality.