Your Board Meets behind Closed Doors in Dallas

A hearty group of about 30 volunteers spent Saturday November 6th near the Dallas Fort Worth airport making sure your Society remains running smooth and efficiently. President Phil Garrou set the tone by introducing many proposed changes to the Board Members at large process to make sure the Board reflects the global weighting of the members. He also proposed changes in the officer structure to make the constitution reflect better how the leadership has evolved over the last 15 years. He gave an upbeat status for the Society and turned the meeting over to each officer and their accomplishmets.

Membership
Chair of membership, Ralph Russell, reported that our Society is seeing approximately the same decrease in numbers that the majority of IEEE societies are experiencing. For example, the 6 societies in IEEE Division I has had a 10.3% decrease during the last year compared to the CPMT loss of 6.9%. Our current membership is 3,092 which is about the level in 1998.
Ralph encouraged all members to apply for Senior Membership and then help their colleagues achieve this goal (do search on "senior member" on www.ieee.org). Ralph indicated that the decision to go senior is a large step toward a member engaging fully in IEEE. In addition, Ralph requests that Board members stay active in our Professional marketing efforts to grow "CPMT" as the brand name in packaging/ components/ manufacturing. He lead a brief discussion of our membership support efforts in Eastern Europe, possibility of making a membership directory as a benefit of belonging, and the December region 10 conference in Asia.
In his alternate roll as Chapter Development Chair, Ralph discussed last year's "Chapter of the Year Award" that went to the Santa Clara Chapter. Ralph was developing a web tool that would enhance the communication ease among our global Chapter leaders. One initiative is to have an "Electronic Distinguished Lecturer Program" which would allow the Chapters to receive a polished lecture and question period at their meeting over the web. This would eliminate the high hurdle of travel time and travel expenses for the Distinguished Lecturers. In addition, Ralph is updating the Volunteer Recruiting Tool Kit that chapters use.

Awards
Rao Bonda of Freescale Semiconductor requested nominations for this year's IEEE CPMT awards. The nomination due date is January 31, 2005. In addition, C. P. Wong mentioned that CPMT had submitted five excellent IEEE Fellow nominations last June and would find out by early December (see articles elsewhere in newsletter). Co-chair of the Fellows Nomination Committee, Dave Palmer, indicated that the Board was encouraging and assisting in about a dozen Fellow nomination efforts which are due by March 1, 2005. Our Society has about 110 Fellows; our Fellows should expect requests for "Letters of Recommendation" for this new group of Fellow nominations since at least 5 letters are needed for each candidate.

ECTC
C. P. Wong reported that by extending the due date for presentation summaries by a few days, the ECTC organizing committee received 506 suggested papers. Approximately350 will be selected for presentation at the meeting in June. There will be a total of 16 Professional Development classes at ECTC. Approximately half of the class attendees are new to ECTC each year. The organizing committee has set aside at least one exhibition booth for Student Chapters but how it is manned (series or parallel) has still not been resolved. C. P. Reported that there remains a good synergetic relationship between ECTC and CPMT.
The 13th Motorola IEEE Graduate Student Fellowship competition will be held between seven student presentations. This ECTC will also hold the 2nd Intel Corp. best student paper contest. IBM will sponsor the ECTC Student Reception on Tuesday night of the conference. There will be a special room set aside for a student poster session to enhance exchanges between students.
New rules were applied to paper selection. For example, session chairs could not be co-authors of papers in their sessions. In general, only one paper in each session could come from each institution. An abstract can only be considered by two subcommittees. These changes are intended to broaden the scope of presentations in each session and to lessen the appearance of "insider" advantage.
Discussions of the nature of the IEEE/NEMI Whisker Workshop and the Advanced Flexible Circuit Board Technology TC meeting are still underway.

Changes in Board
A small team of CPMT leaders proposed the following changes to the structure of the CPMT Board: Elimination of the Secretary position, elevation of Treasurer to a Vice President of Finance position, elimination of Administrative Vice President position, and elimination of Director of Technical Marketing. Changes in the Constitution and ByLaws will soon be published to reflect these approved proposals.
Anthony Chen, VP Administration, proposed that by the next Board meeting members could have wireless LAN connections between their laptop computers or even complete Internet connectivity. One advantage would be the sharing of files, ability for those not at meeting to see presentations, and ability to download from the CPMT home pages. However, several members pointed out that their companies had begun holding "no computer" meetings because the presence of laptops often resulted in meetings up to twice as long because everyone was preoccupied with catching up with email, surfing the web, or playing games. So one engineer's productivity enhancer has become another's window to distraction.

Marketing
Connie Swager, Director of Marketing, announced that 2 million CPMT media impressions (print and electronic) had occurred since June. Another 2 million are expected by the end of 2004. Articles have appeared in Advanced Packaging, Chip Scale Review, Semiconductor International, SMT, Solid State Technology, and Global SMT & Packaging. A Tin Whisker story should soon appear in Fortune Magazine including interviews of Phil Garrou and Ron Gedney. Kristine Martin of Potomac Communications will be interfacing our EPTC Asia meeting with the media. This is part of the Globalization emphasis on CPMT Marketing. Many plans are being made for the upcoming ECTC meeting in Orlando. First steps have been taken to market the Intellectual Property collection of data that CPMT controls.

Ralph Wyndrum
Ralph called in his TAB report concentrating on the issues of Publications, Conferences, and Membership.
In Publication, the whole industry is being shaken by the "expectation" of a lot of users that past papers should be available at no expense on the Internet to everyone. Since publications result in about $20M of income for IEEE our future handling of technical publications is important. Typical expense of each IEEE paper from submission to publication is $900 plus a lot of volunteer editing. It is believed that the peer and professional editing is an important value added. In other subject matter where everyone just posts their own "papers" it has become impossible to separate the few good papers from the many misleading ones. But who and how will future editorial efforts be paid for? Even getting volunteer reviewers is becoming difficult as workers are being overwhelmed by their jobs. However, IEEE has the built-in advantage of established conferences and transactions that entice good papers from good engineers.
Conferences result in about $10M in immediate IEEE income and $10M in further income from the Proceedings rights. The Goal is always to help members in face-to-face technology exchanges. The IEEE is deciding which services to centralize and which to decentralize in the global vision. There is growing conference competition from for-profit groups and other non-profit professional societies. Where the IEEE has been the standard for up to 50 years, we will maintain our strength. However, in new subject matter and in new locations the best answer for members is often jointly sponsored meetings.
Recently IEEE has addressed the Visa problem many members have in applying to attend USA hosted IEEE meetings. Some societies have attempted to meet in several wonderful Canadian cities to avoid this issue but confronted difficulty with US non-citizens trying to quickly cross the border.
75% of conference attendees attend the 25 largest IEEE meetings. Depending on what you include on the IEEE technical meeting list, there are 325-1000 annual IEEE events. The presentations at these meetings are 35% research oriented and 20% describe advanced development. In contrast, our membership is only 11% research occupied with greater than 50% doing product development. Although much of the off-line discussion at IEEE meetings concerns product development, only 3% of our papers address this topic. One membership enticement might be increased product development papers. Historically companies have been hesitant to release such papers although many trade magazines have this flavor.
TAB held a workshop on membership to develop a new model more in keeping with the "age of the Internet." Downside pressure due to the changing "value proposition" to members is added to the lack of investment in the future by IEEE societies in lowering membership. This society near-sightedness is a result of resource restrictions caused by high IEEE overhead charges and negative stock market performance over the last 4 years. There is some concern that IEEE volunteerism may be threatened by inadvertently walking into the perfect "tipping point." However, the financial markets are recovering and the IEEE overhead tax was just reduced by $2 million.
Ralph notes that there are approximately 1 million engineers in the US that would qualify for IEEE membership, but only 225,000 are members. In addition, the expanding health care and broadcasting industries have many workers who would mix well with IEEE activities.
Ralph is now the IEEE-USA President-Elect. His perspective will continue to be excellent on Institute issues.

Conferences
Vice President Ricky Lee reported on the health of CPMT Global Conferences. Board approval was given for our 50% support of a large European pan-CPMT conference beginning every second year. In additon, joint support with ACS and MRS for an Organic Microelectronics Workshop was approved.
Ricky reviewed our 20 major meetings in 2004: 4 in Europe, 6 in Asia, and 10 in USA. Only a few of these fell short on income. For example, Polytronics advertisements went out a bit too late for most members to reserve calendar time. In addition, for 204 most companies and universities restricted conference attendance to minimize expenses.
V. P. Lee noted the 6th EPTC meeting held in December has been established as a major Asia conference covering many CPMT Society topics. In a similar fashion he requested Board support for Region 8 to accomplish a similar goal. The ICEP, SPJWS, and the VLSI packaging Workshop had a good 2004 in Japan. Japan will host EMAP in 2005 and perhaps Polytronics in 2006.

Technical Committees
Vice President Rolf Aschenbrenner reviewed the current status and history of the 18 active Technical Committees. He noted that Dr. Sue Law of Australian Photonics was now the chair of TC-Opto Fiber Optics and Photonics. He also pointed out that the focus of TC- IC and Package Assembly was little studied in Universities anymore. The main developers are now in the EM Service companies who historically sit quietly at CPMT meetings. The chair of TC-Discrete and Integral Passives, Len Schaper, has suggested that the industry push is over and it is time to retire this TC. In addition TC-Systems packaging is thriving under the new chair, Eric Klink.
Rolf suggested that as new topics come up he will assign a task force with short-term goals. Only if long-term interest grows will he initiate a new Technical Committee. The Board agreed that as Vice President he already had the authority to carry out that approach.
Rolf noted that our members have been active for a very long time on NEMI Committees particularly roadmap efforts. He wanted to make sure that more synergy existed such as the Tin Whisker workshop so that our members had more direct benefit.

Publication
Vice President Paul Wesling submitted his report in writing . Paul reports that the artificially low citation Index numbers caused by changing the name of our Transactions five years ago have been recalculated by Thompson ISI, the keepers of the index. Thanks to editor Avi Bar-Cohen for calculating the index as if the name had not changed and officers in CPMT, IEEE, and Thompson for reaching a conclusion that is fair and practical for our members' career advancement. Paul has a team that is also supplying training and web aids for transaction authors to easily find correct references for their publications.
Paul announced that Rick Ulrich's book "Integrated Passives" was published by Wiley/IEEE Press and is selling well. Paul also presented a motion that Prof. Wayne Johnson as Editor of the Transactions on Electronic Packaging Manufacturing, replacing Walt Trybula having served 8 years.

Student Programs
Prof. Bill Brown updated the BOG on activities of the five official student Chapters: Georgia Tech, Romania, Hong Kong, Sweden, and University of Arkansas. Three more Chapters are somewhere along the petition process. Bill presented a motion to provide a financial award for the student chapter of the year; motion passed.

Distinguished Lecturer Activities
Bill Chen, Member at Large of the Board, nominated Ho-Ming Tong for the CPMT Distinguished Lecturer position. Ho-Ming has a long history in Flip-chip and assembly ranging from R&D to Manufacturing and Management. Approval was quick, making Ho-Ming the 21st Distguished Lecturer for CPMT.
Albert Puttlitz reminded everyone of the availability of Lecturers for both conferences and chapter meetings. And reviewed and updated the requirements to remain a distinguished lecturer and to receive travel assistance from CPMT for lecturing.

Next Board Meeting is on the Weekend after ECTC in Orlando Florida (perhaps in the haunted house)