CPMT Silicon Valley Chapter Activities by Tom Tarter

PROFILE OF A CPMT CHAPTER

The Silicon Valley (Santa Clara Valley) chapter of the Components, Packaging & Manufacturing Technology (CPMT) Society, IEEE, has a rich history of involvement in the San Francisco Bay Area engineering community and continues to uphold this history with a tradition of education and information in the manufacturing and packaging sciences, as well as in professional skills. CPMT/SCV has been very active in planning, promoting and supporting a wide variety of technical and professional services and functions. The committee is dedicated to enriching the technical information provided to engineers and scientists in the local area. We do this in several ways. Ongoing activities include monthly dinner meetings, technical conference support, workshops, seminars and professional development classes, as well as joint events with other local chapters and organizations. I would like to share with you some of our activities and give some insight as to how we get things done.

Monthly Dinner Meetings
Dinner meetings are held once per month on the second Wednesday of each month.
Those interested technologists can either come early for a sit-down dinner prior to the talk or may choose to hear the lecture only (which is free of charge). Speakers are selected from personal references, papers or articles which match our member needs, books, lectures, academia and elsewhere. The meetings are very successful and we usually have a large and interested crowd. The speakers typically provide a soft copy of their presentations which are posted on the CPMT/SCV web site for viewing or downloading. After the presentation, audience members can personally interact with the speaker and the other attendees in an informal scenario. The following list shows the dinner meetings held in 2003.

January Wireless LAN Markets and Companies: Upcoming Opportunities --
Satya Chillara, Semiconductor Sector, W. R. Hambrecht

February Illumination with LEDs -- Paul Martin, Lumileds

March Hey Buddy, Can you Spare a Paradigm? Update on efforts by the JEDEC JC15.1 Thermal Characterization Subcommittee to develop standards for simulation and test needed for 21st century technology -- Bruce Guenin, Sun Microsystems

April Manufacturing InfoWeb -- Information Web Service for Global Manufacturing - Dr. Ken Ouchi, President/CEO, Avidtecs

May Modeling and Characterization of Electronic Packaging Materials and Reliability of Products -- Sung Yi, Portland State University

June Electronic Manufacturing Service Companies --Still a Growth Segment --
Keith Dunne, RBC Capital, and Michael Morris, Director and Senior Analyst, Electronics Manufacturing Services and Products, for Smith Barney Equity Researc

September Wire Bonding to Advanced Copper, Low-k Integrated Circuits: the Metal/Dielectric Stacks, and Materials Considerations --
George Harman, Senior Scientist, NIST

October Flexible Automation - Going Where Human Eyes and Fingers Cannot Go -
Charlie Duncheon, Adept Technology, Inc.

November PARC's On-Chip Microcoil Inductor -- Dr. Koenraad Van Schuylenbergh, Palo Alto Research Center and 3M's Embedded Capacitor Material for Decoupling -- Bill Balliette, Electronic Solutions Division, 3M

December Outlook for the Semiconductor Packaging Market for 2004: IC Packaging, SoP, and Testing Directions -- Jim Walker, Dataquest/Gartner Group

Workshops and Professional Development Courses
In addition to the monthly dinner meetings, CPMT/SCV sponsors and organizes professional development classes and workshops for Bay Area professionals. These events are offered for a fee and part of the income goes back into the CPMT/SCV chapter to support other low-cost or free events. The professional development courses are put on by a local independent training service. These courses include titles such as; "Project Management", "Process Metrics", "Speed Reading" and "Transition from Engineering to Management", among others. Workshops consist of half- or full-day lectures from distinguished leaders in fields related to manufacturing, materials, packaging and process. These courses sometimes tie into the monthly dinner meeting so the speaker can get more exposure and those who could not attend the class can get information on the subject. Overall, the classes and workshops are very well attended and very highly rated.

Conference Support
CPMT/SCV is involved quite heavily in several local conferences. These conferences include SEMI-THERM, a semiconductor thermal conference in its 20th year; the Electrical Performance of Electronic Packaging (EPEP) Workshop (in Monterey last year); the International Symposium on Semiconductor Manufacturing (ISSM) in its 12th year; and the IEEE/SEMI International Electronics Manufacturing Technology (IEMT) symposium, focusing on manufacturing, design, test, packaging and other related technologies. The IEMT conference is held in conjunction with Semicon West and this year marks the 29th event. The Santa Clara Valley chapter also sponsors and supports two new conferences: Phopack, a premier photonics packaging conference, and Phomat, which deals with materials and reliability issues related to photonic packaging and manufacturing. In addition to these conferences, we co-sponsor many events in the California area with other IEEE chapters and non-IEEE groups. We also provide core technical sessions and short courses for the IEEE's WESCON exhibition, held alternately in the Bay Area and in Southern California.

Membership Development
The membership chair is responsible for finding and recruiting new members to IEEE and specifically to CPMT. Each year we offer special rates, subsidizing new member dues for the first year for members that are joining CPMT and reside in the local area. We recruit at floor exhibits at the conferences and events we support and heavily utilize documentation and pamphlets from CPMT at our meetings and workshops. The membership chair is also responsible for keeping track of existing members for upgrades to senior or fellow status in the IEEE. Another important duty of the membership chair is to keep on top of non-returning members to find out why they did not sign up and how we can encourage them to return to our chapter.

Keeping in Contact with Members
One of the most important aspects of keeping a long-running chapter healthy is to
maintain contact with our members. The web and email are essential tools for keeping costs low and increasing the potential member base. Having a chapter webmaster is a great plus and increases the visibility of the chapter to members and non-members alike. Our webmaster also administers the email list and sends notices to this list to announce the monthly meetings and special events. Care is taken not to 'spam' the email list, so announcements are sent sparingly but often enough to notify the engineering community of these events. The list currently includes perhaps 200 CPMT members, plus another 300 IEEE members, plus about 1500 non-IEEE members with an interest in materials, packaging, and manufacturing; we see our Chapter charter as extending to the full technical community in the Bay Area, and not only to our paid membership. Having a well designed, informative web site is also necessary. Our web master has done an excellent job of posting and maintaining a large amount of data on a very organized and readable page with links to IEEE, CPMT and other related sites. The URL is www.cpmt.org/scv and I encourage you to check out the fine work by our chapter webmaster.

Volunteers
Of course, the volunteer committee is the key to organizing and successfully implementing these activities. Without the hard work and dedication of the CPMT/SCV Executive Committee, none of these events would take place. Attracting and keeping committee volunteers is an endless job and we are very fortunate to have a talented and enthusiastic group of people who work together to make things happen. The committee is made up of elected and appointed* members.

The CPMT/SCV Executive Committee
Chair Thomas S. Tarter
Vice-Chair Bernie Siegal
Treasurer Annette Teng-Cheung
Secretary Allen M. Earman
Program Chair* Harvey Miller
Education Chair* John Jackson
Membership Chair* Dave Tovar
Web Master/Advisor* Paul Wesling
Advisor / Transactions* Luu Nguyen

Others active in developing the program and projects for the Chapter are Bob Dubin, Jim Mars, Ephraim Suhir, Bill Chen, Janis Karklins, Ron Blankenhorn, Thorsten Teutsch, Sri Seelin, Elliott Alber, Guna Selvaduray, Sue Smith, David Angst, Kazumi Allen, Ken Ariathurai, Rich Blish, Liz Logan, Tom Chung, Terry Dishongh, Joe Fjelsted, and Daryl Martin. We focus on providing meanful tasks for all the interested volunteers.

Executive committee meetings are held monthly. In these meetings we review the upcoming dinner meetings, conference support, student and academia interaction, membership, advertising and web management, among other business, and make decisions based on input from our esteemed colleagues and officers. Because these are volunteer activities it is especially noble for those who give their time and effort to the CPMT to educate and communicate new ideas and better ways of doing things to our members and friends. Without the volunteers, our chapter would not be so successful. The 2003 picnic planning meeting was a great success. The SCV Chapter executive committee at their summer planning meeting, poolside at Paul Wesling's home. From left: John Jackson, Luu Nguyen, Bill Chen, Tom Tarter, Allen Earman, Paul Wesling, Annette Cheung, Bob Dubin, and Ephraim Suhir.

Conclusion
The various activities sponsored by the CPMT/SCV chapter help engineers to keep up with new and advanced technology and to improve their skill sets for the ever changing job market. The professional development classes and successful technical conferences help to support the chapter financially, which allows us to expand our role in starting new conferences for advanced topics and to offer reasonable costs for such events. Each of these events helps to recruit new members and committee volunteers, and to increase our mailing list for better coverage of the technical community. The informal nature of the evening meetings also fosters a sense of community and outreach where individuals can network to better their jobs or find new opportunities and share essential information that can be found nowhere else.

I hope your chapter can learn from these examples and has the same kind of dedication and determination as our chapter members do. Don't hesitate to contact us for more information.