President's Report

Returning from the ECTC Conference in Orlando what else can there be to talk about. The meeting was once again a rousing success. Preliminary attendance figures showed 900+ paid attendees from all over the world. A big BRAVO goes out to Donna Noctor -General Chair and Eric Perfecto - Program Chair. Of course none of this could have happened without the efforts of the entire conference committee and the100+ members of the program committee who work to put the technical program together.

There was a very useful "lead free" panel discussion manned by Amkor, AMD, IBM, Flextronics, Infineon, Kyocera and NEC and a great CPMT sponsored session from Japan on "Advanced Flex Circuit Board Technologies". There were several good sessions on wafer level and 3D packaging (topics close to my technical heart) and good sessions updating the attendees on the latest in the Nano and RF fields. The biggest complaint we still hear has to be that the attendee has to choose between 6 parallel sessions and its hard to know what to go see in person . . . . but that's a good problem to have.

Aside from all the technical information that is stuffed into these 3 days after Memorial Day, the most important opportunity that presents itself is the opportunity to network with the leaders of the industry that are in attendance. I know I love getting back together with folks I have worked with in the past and meeting new people. In the old days I enjoyed being introduced to all the "old timers" from Bell Labs and IBM who really knew what was going on. Now….many years later…..being one of the old guys, I enjoy meeting the younger engineers…the ones full of energy and ready to change the world.

Speaking about changing the world, at the CPMT lunch we gave out the CPMT "field award" to Tsukada-san from IBM Yasu for the work he did in the areas of high density laminates (SLC for those who know the lingo) and the brilliant concept of underfilling bumped chips when they were mounted on PWB to alleviate the stress and CTE miss match issues. As I said at the luncheon, in hindsight this probably does not sound astounding to you NOW, but I was there back then and bumping was a high end, high cost packaging technique that was only used for mainframed and only in combination with ceramic packages. The work of Tsukada and his co-workers at IBM Yasu revolutionized the industry and allowed bumping to be used in low cost consumer applications. To quote myself, "Many of you out there today, would not have jobs or miniature cell phones if it were not for this activity 15-20 years ago."

Congratulations to our new fellows:

Mr. Paul B. Wesling
Self-employed
for contributions to multimedia education development within the IC packaging.

Prof. Jorma Kalevi Kivilahti
Helsinki University of Technology
for contributions to the reliability of lead-free electronics.

Dr. William D. Brown
University of Arkansas
for leadership in furthering education of high density electronics.

Prof. Yonhua Tzeng
Auburn University
for contributions to diamond manufacturing processes..

Congratulations to our newly elected CPMT Board of Governors members :

Eric Beyne - IMEC
Steve Bezuk - Kyocera
Kitty Pearsall-IBM

And all our other award winners.

Hope to see everyone again at next years event in San Diego !

-- Paul Garrou, President of our Society