Board Meets at Disney World
President Phil Garrou opened the Board meeting early Saturday June 4 immediately after the highly successful ECTC meeting. Forty Board Members attended, a new record. He started by lauding the many years of volunteer positions that John Segelken (CPMT Treasurer) and Connie Swager (CPMT Marketing) had performed. At the end of the meeting John and Connie rode off into the animated sunset. Phil then introduced some new members of the Board including Jusheng Ma (Beijing Chapter Chair), Eric Beyne (IMEC), Philip Chan, and Kitty Pearsall (IBM).

Division I Director

---Lewis Terman, Director of IEEE Society Division I, gave an eye opening talk on the workings of IEEE. He stressed that the Societies and Councils are where the value comes from in IEEE. All the technical publication and conference intellectual property is initiate from the 42 groups like CPMT. From the 324,561 IEEE members there are 316,396 memberships in these generation groups. However, each member averages 1.6 societies so only about 57% of IEEE members claim a technical society. This number is dropping, perhaps partly because one can get publications electronically rather than only through society membership
Over the last 4 years the IEEE headquarters finances were making most of the headlines. In 2003 the total IEEE reserves rose by $26M and by the end of 2005 they should reach $130M which is about 50% of the annual budget (the litmus test for a healthy organization). The reserves are being very conservatively invested. He worries that only about $2M are available for new initiatives each year; a small amount for an innovative profession.
---The IEEE membership is up by 0.5% in the same 12 months over which society membership was down 3.9%. Regions 7 - 10 have 38% of the members and are growing the fastest. About 8% of our members (25,000) are life members, a category that may not be financially sustainable in the future. Many considerations are being given to attracting members from related growing fields such as healthcare instrumentation.
---Publications have historically fed the surplus by $30M/year. IEL/XPLORE are growing to be an income producing product that will replace the paper transactions of the past. An access plan for small companies has been launched. The dispute of working with articles from "black-listed" countries was resolved to IEEE satisfaction. However, the easy electronic access to articles is a mixed blessing. For example, since IEL is available without being a Society member, many have lost need to associate with a society. Recently the number of electronic articles retrieved have been equally from conference proceedings as from archival journals.
He reports that the TAB has refocused on the future and the most important challenges to continued success. He empathized with the CPMT complaint that the tax of 1/3 of our net income to support the IEEE infrastructure was too high. There was a discussion on ways to increase income of chapters and increasing fees for international meetings

ECTC Report

Pat Thompson reported that there were slightly more than 900 total attendance (750 full paid). This is the largest turn-out other than durng Las Vegas years. Pat wondered if this large number was due to the excellent program, the theme parks, or the follow on convention at the Hotel. There were 16 professional development courses with 285 pupils. The Tin Whisker workshop was well attended with about 100. The new special topics meetings saw 100 at the Nano-technologies, and 50 at the Bio-tech. The education session was scheduled in conflict with many sessions that demanded professors to attend so next year the timing will be optimized. Pat indicated that the special student poster sessions on the last day resulted in more visits and more visibility of the students.
Although hotels for a group as large as ECTC must be arranged way ahead of time, there is action toward moving to the Contemporary hotel in Orlando in the future and moving to a cooler part of Nevada (Reno) next time. These changes should save our members 40% on hotel fees also. This year's ECTC should make a respectable surplus for the continuation of our Society.
Next year Rao Bonda will be assistant Program Chair, Torsten Wipiejewski will be program Chair, and Eric Perfecto will be Vice General Chair.

Society Business

Vice President Ricky Lee reviewed the many CPMT conferences. A big debate occurred concerning the impact the expanding multi-focus Society meetings in Europe and Asia will have on the 55-year old ECTC which is always held in the United States. To date the success of the EPTC has correlated to expansion in all other society activities including more region 10 attendees and speakers at ECTC (this year set an attendance record for a non-Vegas ECTC). Decision was to go ahead with the European ESTC and continual growth of the Asian EPTC while monitoring impact on all other meetings.

Vice President Rolf Ashenbrenner reported that our iNEMI roadmap involvement started late but proved worthwhile on the individual volunteer level. Rolf also reported that Martin Goetz of IBM has agreed to Chair the IC and Packaging Assembly Technical Committee. In addition, the TC-"Discrete and Integrated Passives" is being merged with the RF and Wireless since much of the current research falls in both areas.
The informal task force structure is now in place to allow quick response to apparent trends in technology without having to establish a standing technical committee. It is anticipated that most task forces will finish their activities within 2-3 years and not need to continue forever.

Vice President Paul Wesling introduced Vasu Alturi of Intel as the next Newsletter editor, starting in December. He also mentioned Philip Chan as the New Director of IP Mining and Ontology for CPMT Publications. In addition, Avram Bar-Cohen is now the Editor-in-Chief of our three Transactions.
Paul described how our transactions "Impact Factors" have been recomputed by ISI and show considerable improvement. This factor is important for Universities to quantify the importance of publishing in our Transactions. Since we changed our Transaction names recently, the established ISI way of measuring Impact based on references to only the new name was vastly undercounting the true impact. Both by having editors and reviewers remind authors of recent work pertinent to their paper and by speeding the time from submittal to publication, the "Impact" of the transactions can increase considerably.
Paul discussed the two possible solutions to the financial problem presented by the switch of publications to all Internet. First, IEEE could charge an upfront fee to the authors of an article (say $1000) to pay for the peer review, editing, cross referencing, and inserting in the huge IEEE publication library. A second approach is to charge only the readers each time another paper is searched. Right now we are mostly following the second approach with 50% of the publication income to our Society coming from the IEL database usage of CPMT articles. Another 35% of the income is proportional to the fraction of articles coming from CPMT.
Nomination Chair John Segelken announced that C. P. Wong would take over this position. Under the new system of the 6 new Board members to be elected this autumn, 4 will be from the Americas, one from Europe and one from Asia. For example, the ballots to members in region 10 will allow for voting for one of the listed candidates from Asia. Nominations must be in by 22 July.

--------Fellow Committee Chair C. P. Wong thanked everyone for the hard work producing and reviewing many Fellow nominations from among the CPMT membership. A discussion was held as to how the IEEE Fellows committee decides how many Fellows to award to each Society each year. No one knew the formula...if there is one.
Membership Chair, Ralph Russell described the thinking behind the slowly retreating membership numbers for most Societies. Of our members, approximately 13% are very active in producing the publications and conferences (the people that get their pictures in the Newsletter). Another 33% of members are motivated as users of the publication and meeting content. They are very active users. Both these groups tend to remain CPMT members for decades unless their careers take a large technology change (they go from components to marketing). However another group of 33% tends to be young and non-USA. This group is neither active as volunteers or as intense users of CPMT "product". They are just "kind-of" interested. The future of any society depends on engaging a reasonable percentage of this group. Ralph described several approaches to this group: more communication, IEEE portal, membership package sent to chapters and conferences, a disposable membership display for chapters putting on conferences, and including some CPMT promotion at each conference we sponsor (visibility). As of April 2005 our membership stood at 2756 down 6% in the last year, about the same as for all IEEE societies.

----Ralph also described the two Boy Scout Merit Badge books and electronics kit that resulted from an IEEE committee that he has headed for several years.
Asia Liaison Chair Bill Chen presented the CPMT Sister Chapter Program that is being developed between Santa Clara Section and the Malaysia Chapter. Since many engineers travel between the two regions it is hoped to enlist these people to give tutorials and share experience on both sides of the Pacific. They hope to share: seminar speakers, seminar materials, experimental WEB chapter meeting broadcasts, and good ideas.
Rao Tummala mentioned that we have had two CPMT IEEE Field award winners of note to the whole industry. We want to keep this trend. He suggested that we look in the CPMT many technologies and list all breakthroughs in the last 15 years. Then by each breakthrough list the people most responsible for the vision and the practice should be listed. Those individuals that stand out should be submitted to the Field Award.
Vasu Atluri announced that the Phoenix Chapter was putting on its annual workshop on November 10th. It will involve RF devices, Interconnects, and Packaging for the Next Generation.
Student Chapter Chair Bill Brown discussed the 3 student chapter booths in this years exhibition: Hong Kong, Sweden, and University of Arkansas. The Sisphyus task of bringing chapter to San Jose, Romania, and Shanghai is continuing. A Student Chapter web site keeper is being looked for.
Johan Liu of Chalmers University gave the Region 8 report. Many meetings have been held with good eastern European countries participating. Three new Senior Members were earned recently. Already eight separate Chapters in Europe are supporting the upcoming Polytronics'05 in Poland. The new all-Europe ESTC is aimed at Dresden in 2006. Some exciting scenes of the city were shown to motivate Board members to start practicing their German conversation.

-----Treasurer John Segelken had some black numbers on his ledger. In 2003 we had a surplus of $349K from a revenue of $1,386K. This brought our reserves to $2M. In 2004 the surplus grew to $497K from a revenue of $2,150K. With investment growth the reserves at the end of 2004 was $2.5M. Projections for 2005 say $76K surplus from revenue of $1,813. Our bill to IEEE is still the second largest claim against the revenue but a growing proportion is being used prudently to expand member services.

------Education Vice President Al Puttlitz updated the board on the Distinguished Lecturer activity and asked for a 50% expansion of travel assistance for this group of lecturers. He also announced the Motorola Ph.D Fellowship winner. The successful professional development courses now have an excellent Certificate designed by Kristine Martin of Potomic Communication.