The SSCS Administrative Committee (AdCom) approved the year 2000 budget. Before inclusion of any capital appreciation of the reserves, the budget shows a negative bottom line of $24.5 thousand with expenses of approximately $2.7 million. The 2000 budget meets the IEEE mandated requirement of improvement of the bottom line over 1999 by 3% of the 1999 expenses after meeting expenses have been removed.
The AdCom funded a number of new initiatives and continued ongoing programs.
The AdCom approved two archival CD-ROM sets, which will be of great interest to SSCS members and the solid-state circuits community in general:
A CD-ROM of the ISSCC 2000 Short Course on Circuits and Devices for RF Wireless Networks was approved and is being prepared. It will be offered to those who attend the short course at ISSCC and will also be available to nonattendees at a price approximately equal to the registration for the short course. Look for announcements in future newsletters.
The AdCom voted for the SSCS to become member of the new IEEE Sensors Council, the formation of which was approved by the IEEE Technical Activities Board earlier this year. The Sensors Council will be involved in the theory, design, fabrication, manufacturing, and application of devices for sensing and transducing physical, chemical, and biological phenomena, with emphasis on the electronics, physics, and reliability aspects of sensors and integrated sensor-actuators. SSCS representatives are Bernhard Boser from the University of California at Berkeley and Johan Huijsing from Delft University of Technology, Netherlands.
Fourteen chapters applied for and received funding for their projects. See "Chapters News" on page 12 for a detailed report. Additional funding has been set aside for requests from any new chapters that form during the year.
The AdCom approved technical cosponsorship of six meetings in 2000:
1. VLSI Technology Symposium
2. Asia-Pacific Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (AP-ASIC)
3. European Solid-State Circuits Conference (ESSCIRC)
4. Bipolar/BiCMOS Circuits and Technology Meeting (BCTM)
5. GaAs IC Symposium
6. Symposium Southwest Symposium on Mixed-Signal Design
Practices for reviewing and evaluating technical meetings sponsored by the Society are being developed. Meeting metrics, including the number of attendees, speakers, papers submitted, and papers accepted will continue to be collected. A questionnaire will be developed to poll how attendees of a meeting view its quality. The meetings committee is interested in working with meeting leadership to achieve the goals of each meeting.
A promotion for new IEEE and Society members at the ISSCC was approved. Registrants at ISSCC at the nonmember rate will be able receive a free six-month membership in the IEEE, SSCS, and the Electron Devices Society by filling out an application form at the meeting. This is one of several very successful cooperative membership promotions with EDS; new cooperative membership promotions with other IEEE societies are being investigated.
Although approximately 175 members of the SSCS are IEEE Life Members, they do not qualify for Life Membership in SSCS because the Society is less than five years old, and the IEEE Bylaws require five years of membership in a society to qualify for society Life Member status. The AdCom has decided to rectify this situation. The SSCS will simply fund the Society membership for IEEE Life Members who have been SSCS members for all three years of its existence. Vouchers to enable this were enclosed in IEEE renewal mailings to those members who qualify.
The next AdCom meeting is scheduled for Sunday 6 February, preceding the ISSCC.
For the complete minutes and attached reports, visit the SSCS Web site at www.sscs.info.minutes.