Message from the EDS President
It
has been my privilege and honor to serve as the President of the
Electron Devices Society for the last two years. It has also been
two years of tremendous challenge and change. This will be the
last message I write to you as President, so it is a time to reflect
back over this period. I hope that I am leaving the position with
the Society in better shape to face the future. I can look at
some of the high points of the last two years with pride and satisfaction.
These include; the celebration of EDS' 50th Anniversary; the development
of a strategic plan with a primary focus on our technical committees,
and the progress towards fulfilling our goal of providing our
members with on-line access to a 'complete' set of EDS publications
by digitizing all legacy content (pre-1988) for Electron Device
Letters, Transactions on Electron Devices and the IEDM proceedings.
The challenge over the last two years has been one of responding
to the dramatic change in our businesses and the economy within
the world of electron devices. The change has been one where a
dramatic decrease in the amount of commercial research and development
has occurred. The result of this decrease has reduced our pool
of traditional members; and in turn, has decreased the attendance
at our technical meetings and the number of subscribers to our
publications. These challenges and the fact that the IEEE as a
whole was experiencing a budget crisis drove much of the behavior
over the last two years and it was mostly one of belt tightening
and deferring plans for expansion.
In my last message, I said that the challenges that we are confronted
within the research and businesses that the Society represents
are greater now than they have been for our entire history. We
are looking at the end of the roadmap for the transistor scaling,
a globalized economy that is making many of our technology innovations
a widely available commodity and new technology developments that
will challenge and disrupt our established institutions. The viability
of the Society will be determined by how quickly we will be able
to adapt to these changes and position the technical component
of the Society to the interests and needs of the people who will
be driving these changes.
I think that we have made significant steps to position the Society
in such a way that it will maintain a technical edge. We have
created the position of Technical Committees Chair that has AdCom
voting rights and is included as a member of the EDS Executive
Committee (ExCom). The key purpose of this position is to quickly
tie the new technical activities in the Society to the other areas
of our business, mainly our technical meetings and publications,
to ensure the Society maintains its value to our members. We are
hoping with this organizational change that the Society will again
be primarily driven by its vital technical component.
I believe that the future will be determined by how well we can
attract the best researchers and developers to participate in
the Society's plans. We have created several new technical committees
over the last several years and have given the technical committees
a greater influence in the direction of the Society activities.
I would like to see more Society members become active in these
committees along with the organizing and editorial committees
for the meetings and journals. We have also made considerable
progress over the last two years in positioning the EDS Executive
Office to better serve the membership and to create a more efficient
operation for the Society business. This has made it easier for
the volunteers to use their time more effectively.
I hope that all of these changes have created a foundation for
the Society to grow and thrive in the future.
Steven J. Hillenius
Agere Systems
Allentown, PA USA