Beginning a New Era

With this issue, we bid farewell to our gallant NEWSLETTER editor for about the last 20 years - Dr. David Palmer of Sandia National Laboratories. We've become so accustomed to emailing him our news, conference information, and committee updates that it's going to be hard to make the adjustment. Yes, Dave will still be around, but he has found other hobbies to occupy his spare time. We'll miss you, Dave!
Beginning with the December issue, we introduce Dr. Vasudeva Atluri of Intel Corp in Chandler, AZ USA as the editor of the CPMT Society's NEWSLETTER. Vasu has been very active in the Phoenix Chapter over the past 15 years, serving as Chapter Chair and as Workshops Chair. He even served a term as Chair of the Phoenix Section. Besides organizing events and bringing in funds for the Section and Chapter, he also founded the Section's Student Scholarship Endowment. He is Silicon Integration Manager in Assembly Technology Development at Intel, with interests in electronic packaging. His group is responsible for ensuring that all technical issues are properly managed to enable successful interface between silicon and assembly technology development groups, with a major focus on first-level interconnects. He is also responsible for the design of test chips that help validate performance and reliability of silicon after it has been packaged and helps in defining design rules for product designs. His BS degree is in Chemical Engineering, and he went on to get three advanced degrees from University of Arizona (Tucson, Arizona) including M.S. in Materials Science and Engineering, M.S. in Metallurgical Engineering, and a Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering with a minor in Electrical Engineering and specialization in Silicon fabrication. He is an inquisitive individual, with good editing skills developed on in-house Intel publications, and I'm sure you will all enjoy working with him and reading the CPMT news in future issues.

As a final paragraph, I want all CPMT Members to know about the spiffy new interface to IEEE's XPLORE on-line research site (ieeexplore.ieee.org). You no longer need to be an IEEE Member to scan journal tables of contents, retrieve abstracts, and run full-text or keyword searches (even "saved searches" that email you when a new paper gets posted that meets your criteria!) Any researcher is encouraged to set up his/her own "MyXPLORE" account, at no cost. Of course, only Members/subscribers can download the actual papers - but these days, many of you have IEL/XPLORE subscriptions to the full IEEE collection (1.2 million papers, and all of CPMT's papers back to 1954), so you are welcome to retrieve as many as you like. We encourage you to use this prior art in solving your current problems and guiding your next efforts. And I forgot to tell you - you can use Google to search the full IEEE collection, including full-text search; IEEE has released all the metadata and text of the papers for the Google engine to catalog. How cool is that!? So, the next time you wonder what has been done already in your areas of interest, do a quick XPLORE or Google search and see what your fellow professionals have been publishing on the subject.

Paul Wesling
VP-Publications