John K. Lowell
John K. Lowell |
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The Spring 2001 meeting of the EDS AdCom was held on July 7 at the Westin Stamford & Westin Plaza Hotel in Singapore in collaboration with the IEEE Int. Symposium on Physical & Failure Analysis of Integrated Circuits (IPFA).
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EDS President, Cary Y. Yang, gives his opening remarks for the July 2001 EDS AdCom meeting in Singapore. |
President, Cary Yang, opened the meeting with a hearty thanks to M.K. Radhakrishnan (CPMT/ED/R Singapore Chapter Chair) and his officers for hosting the AdCom visit. Following formal acceptance of the minutes from the December 2000 meeting and the new meetings list, he elaborated on several IEEE actions having an important impact of the EDS. The Y2000 deficit has had a major impact on the IEEE's finances and budget. Consequently, technical society reserves will be used to cover the shortfall, and EDS is no exception. Our IEEE deficit assessment under this new arrangement was $871.9K. In addition, another reduction (possibly up to twice this amount) is likely to occur again in 2001 if the stock market remains depressed. The apportionment is based on the amount of "reserves per member," and EDS enjoys the fourth highest reserve of all the technical societies at $6.8M. In addition to the stock market, this situation is also due to IEEE keeping its infrastructure costs frozen and not increasing member rates over the past few years. In general, IEEE enjoys good financial health but its operations will require changes such as a freeze on spending reserves and increasing costs. At this point the Y2002 expectations are unknown, and while planning for a balanced budget (assuming a 6% ROI) continues, it is possible that a third levy may be required. In addition, increases in membership dues (+$15) and IEEE package products are expected. The projected Institute budget should evolve to spending only 5% return on our investment. Ensuing AdCom discussions centered on what EDS can or should do to confront this issue. On the surface it would appear that EDS is being penalized for being successful and practicing good fiscal habits. However, all IEEE entities are affected, and in truth, all their respective funds belong to IEEE. Our representatives are being heard at TAB meetings and at the Board level. Suggested modifications to EDS spending to deal with this situation are being discussed.
Bill Van Der Vort, standing in for April Brown, gave the Treasurer's Report. In general, the Y2000 budget matched the estimated figures. The publication cost of the EDS Membership Directory was significantly higher than budgeted, primarily due to the growth in the EDS membership the past two years. While the directory is available both in published and electronic form, the EDS AdCom recently voted to publish it every two years rather than annually to save costs. T-ED income from voluntary page charges and nonmember fees were slightly down, and both the ECS Letters and the EDS CD-ROM Package showed a slight loss. Revenue from the IEEE Book Broker program continues to be very good, returning $441K to EDS. Due to another successful year, EDS surplus for Y2000 was $537.7K. As also stated previously, EDS has $6.8M in its present reserves with a $236K budgeted surplus for 2001 independent of what fiscal support will be required from IEEE. The net budgeted surplus for Y2002 is $569.3K. Costs incurred from Graduate Student Fellowship support, continued globalization, Executive Office costs, and chapter subsidies are expected to rise in 2001. AdCom has approved increases for regular and permanent membership fees, and EDL & T-ED subscriptions for both members and non-members.
The Executive Office report was given by Bill Van Der Vort. Since December, he and his staff have been busy with a variety of projects such as continuation of the EDS oral histories booklet, and support for the IEEE TAB Nanotechnology Committee. Both of these efforts are discussed in greater detail later in this article. In addition, they have worked with EDS officers and committees on the budgets for J-MEMS, T-SM, and M-C&D to meet the fiscal challenges outlined above, implementation of the Regions/Chapters restructuring and Chapter Partners Program, coordination of the biennial Region 10 Chapters Meeting, the rollout of the Senior Membership incentive, implementation of a worldwide program to subsidize memberships for low-income members, development of a proposed half-year membership promotion, and continuation of providing administrative support for the Independent Short Course Program. Other major accomplishments have been the coordination of the Graduate Student Fellowship program, the distribution of a policy letter to all the Distinguished Lecturers, putting in improvements to streamline the Distinguished Lecturers program as a whole, putting in a new manuscript system for T-ED, completing the move of the T-ED publications office, and ongoing support for the T-DMR. As the year progresses, the Executive Office will be involved in the ongoing support for many of the tasks discussed below, as well as with putting together a biennial meeting of the Region 9 chapters, increasing the Distinguished Lecturers program visibility by expanding its information on the EDS website, providing web-site support for the technical committees, and arranging the 8th EDS Meeting Organizers Workshop.
As of December 31, 2000, EDS membership stood at 13,283 as reported by James Kuo, Membership Chair. While this number is still dominated by Regions 1-6, Regions 8 and 10 are increasing, with Region 10 growing the fastest. The total number represents a net gain of 2.5% from 1999 with the number of permanent members up almost 400 over the same year. Special membership projects such as on-site promotions at IEDM and ISSCC have added 200 members. Other new recruiting packages offering free EDS membership to any IEEE member added another 31 members this year. The committee also provided special membership packets to all EDS Distinguished Lecturers, coordinated the annual TIP mailing to non-EDS members who indicated EDS as an interest, and renewed the membership and publication arrangement for eleven East European chapters. This year EDS implemented a new membership fee subsidy program to chapters supporting persons with income under $8,600, a limit set by IEEE guidelines. So far, three chapters (or a total of 24 members) are taking advantage of this offer. Another initiative designed to encourage qualified members to apply for IEEE Senior Membership status has resulted in fifty new Senior Members. James also outlined a new proposal to extend a free, half-year membership in EDS to new IEEE, non-EDS members. A similar strategy was successfully used by the IEEE Communications Society (ComSoc) doubling its membership. If approved, the program would cost $31K in its first year and $57K in the second. Projections indicate that EDS could potentially add 6,000+ new members in the initial year, and 5,500 more in the second based on an estimated 12% return. While the idea is attractive, AdCom discussion pointed out that ComSoc is different than EDS, and what worked for them may not have the same result for EDS. In addition, in light of the fiscal issues mentioned above, EDS must be judicious about "costs-per-member" against a potential influx of new members. The proposal will be discussed again in December.
As reported by Hiroshi Iwai, Regions/Chapters Chair, EDS currently has 103 chapters worldwide, including 8 student branches. The recent division of chapter management into five subcommittees (SRCs), namely North America East/Canada, North America West, Latin America, Europe/Africa/Middle East, and Asia/Pacific, has allowed for a geographic redistribution of chapter partners with clearly established responsibilities.
Ilesanmi Adesida, Chairman of Educational Activities, summarized the major educational programs: Distinguished Lecturers (DL), the EDS Graduate Student Fellowship, Vanguard Independent Short Courses, and Outreach. On the DL side, a letter was composed (to be distributed biannually) to all participants reminding them of their responsibilities. Specifically, that to remain in the DL program, each lecturer must give (at least) one lecture every two years. Forty-five DL lectures have already been given/are scheduled for 2001 that is commensurate with the Y2000 numbers and costs. Information on the EDS Graduate Fellowship program is given later in this article. The Vanguard Independent Short Courses program is an effort pointed to providing timely education to practicing engineers. Five courses have been given so far in 2001 covering the topics of RF CMOS, Fiber Optics, Modeling for Design and Reliability, and High-K Dielectrics with one class being presented in Taiwan. At this point, the committee is reviewing and assessing the outcome of these classes looking at pricing, materials, topics, quality, and member interest. Since the program is running a significant deficit, due mostly to increased costs and undersubscribed classes, EDS needs to improve the infrastructure, find local champions, solicit region and chapter leaders, technical committees, and involve a new industrial relations committee (see below) to improve these offerings. At this point, the courses will continue at 1-2 classes per year but will critically look at better topic selection and possibly industrial support or sponsorship. The Outreach program continues to support chapter formation in "disadvantaged" areas worldwide.
Reporting for the Publications Committee, Chair, Renuka Jindal, cited editorial policy and procedures, quality, speed, recognition, circulation and budget as the principal tasks for his group. The Publications Committee in 2001 is considering adding representatives from all EDS-sponsored and co-sponsored publications, the EDS Meetings Committee, and EDS technical committees. This expanded group will be better suited to deal with manuscript review uniformity, resolution of authorship disputes, proper referencing of previous work, and other editorial policy issues. General quality continues to improve as publication metrics become established. Renuka is looking at impact factors, or some other custom metric based on citations, to judge the use and quality of EDS publications such as T-ED and EDL. Both these journals now enjoy centralized manuscript handling through the IEEE office in Piscataway, which has streamlined the entire publication process. This year's Rappaport award winner is "SON (Silicon-on-Nothing)–An Innovative Process for Advanced CMOS" by M. Jurczak and co-authors, published in T-ED November 2000 (Vol.47, No.11). Recognition for EDS authors continues to grow as the Rappaport award runner-up will now receive a recognition letter and possibly be nominated for IEEE prize paper awards. Editors too will be honored when they retire with special ceremonies at a conference of their choosing. The EDS 50th anniversary "best paper" selection of seminal papers from T-ED, EDL, and IEDM continues to be discussed, but difficulties have arisen in judging worthy contributions published after 1994 when only using citation index, since not enough time has elapsed to collect a hundred citations or more. For this collection, it is harder to deem the definition of "best." With the trend towards electronic publishing increasing, the committee is working to understand its impact on circulation. This also impacts the budget as EDS deals with the $100K cost of providing online access to EDS publications with a possible reduction of the number of journals offered electronically. Renuka also announced that the forthcoming T-ED Special Issue on bipolar devices will include an invited paper by Jim Early. In conclusion, he discussed efforts to obtain the rights to a historic limerick recorded by Bell Labs staff at the 1957 DRC which will be referenced in the Special Issue on Bipolar Devices and made available on IEEE Xplore.
Meetings Chair, Ken Galloway, announced that 135 meetings are expected in 2001. Of these, 33 will be sponsored/cosponsored, 93 are technically sponsored, and 9 remain cooperatively supported. Since 1999, when IEEE started charging penalty fees for late conference closings, EDS has paid $6,478.00. Almost all these charges were assessed in the first eighteen months. Copies of the Photovoltaic Specialists Conference (PVSC) Archival CD-ROM given to EDS could potentially generate up to $120K in extra income. The CD-ROM includes all past proceedings from 1962 to the 28th PVSC.
Since December, our Technical Committee (TC) Coordinator Chair, Steve Hillenius, has been soliciting representatives from all the technical committees to serve on the Publications and Meetings Committees. Narain Arora heads the recently formed (as of March 2001) Compact Modeling TC. The charter of this group is to identify, examine, and evaluate current models for active/passive components used for circuit simulation emphasizing models for components/interconnect required for chip design. They have established a website, and a 1-day seminar targeted for the September FSA meeting is in the works. The TC will also hold its first workshop on MOSFET modeling in April 2002 with an interconnect modeling workshop in conjunction with IEEE Interconnect Symposium to follow in 2002. Narain's talk listed other planned activities including continued work with WCM-MSM in 2002, tutorials on existing models, and an online journal on compact modeling (proposed).
Next, Cary Yang reported on the 2001 Fellows Evaluation, and on a couple of new EDS initiatives. On the Fellows front, 46 nominations for Fellow were received down slightly from last year's numbers. As usual, the winners will be announced in November. Bruce Griffing and Cary Yang have led an effort to examine ways to open AdCom elections to the general membership and to make the election process generally more efficient. Some of these first efforts have been initiated and were described by Cary. For example, this year's nominations for EDS Vice-President were opened to EDS ExCom members for the first time. As a result, Ilesanmi Adesida and Hiroshi Iwai will stand for election in December. This paves the way for the following proposals:
These reforms will be discussed further in December. Finally, Cary discussed establishing an Adhoc Industrial Relations Committee for EDS following a suggestion by former EDS President and current Awards Chair, Al Mac Rae. The purpose of this group is to acquire more input on "practicing engineer" professional needs reacting to overall IEEE membership trends & statistics. The committee will be announced this Fall.
Arlene Santos, Chair of the Graduate Fellow Subcommittee, reviewed the results of the initial EDS Graduate Student Fellowship program. This year's winners are, from the Americas, Yee-Chia Yeo (University of California, Berkeley), from the Asia-Pacific, Sergei Kucheyev (The Australian National University, Australia), and, from Europe, Middle East and Africa, Tusharkanti Ghosh (Lancaster University, UK). These individuals will each receive $5K, with their department and professor receiving $1K each to support the work of the awardees. Each recipient will also receive a plaque in a formal presentation at the IEDM. Overall, 11 nominations were received: five from the Americas, three from the Europe/Africa/ Middle East, and three from the Asia/ Pacific areas. EDS salutes these individuals, all the nominees, and everyone involved for a successful initial year of this program. Arlene also reported that the 2002 EDS 50th Anniversary Celebration will be held at the December IEDM in San Francisco. A celebration dinner will to be added to the IEDM activities, possibly to include those individuals participating in the oral histories program. A special EDS historical exhibit will also be on display. The AdCom also received an update on the IEEE Nanotechnology Conference for 2001 of which EDS is one of four sponsoring societies. The IEEE TAB Nanotechnology Council may be formed in 2002 pending approval this November. IEEE's Transactions on Nanotechnology Editor-in-Chief, Prof. S. Tiwari of Cornell, will initiate publication in early 2002. A motion to provide up to $3K for support of the IEEE TAB Nanotechnology Committee for 2002 was approved and passed. In conclusion, reports from the ED/SSC Yugoslavia Chapter, 2001 IEDM, and 2000 Int. Conf. on Microelectronics were heard.
The next meeting of the EDS ExCom/AdCom will be in Washington, D.C., on December 1 and 2, 2001, in conjunction with IEDM.
John K. Lowell
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