The IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society AdCom met in San Francisco on 28 August 2000. Actions at the meeting included expanded funding of digital archives, continued cooperation to provide technical cosponsorship for a number of conferences, expanded subsidies for the Society's growing number of chapters, funding of an additional predoctoral fellowship, and plans to survey membership satisfaction in 2001. Full minutes of the meeting, along with background attachments and presentations, are available at www.sscs.org/info/minutes.
The Society currently has two levels of conference sponsorship: full sponsorship and technical cosponsorship. Dealing first with sponsored meetings, the AdCom approved Tim Tredwell of Kodak as the new chair of the ISSCC Executive Committee beginning in 2001. A representative of each major SSCS-sponsored conference, ISSCC, CICC, and the VLSI Circuits Symposium reported paper submission and acceptance patterns, attendance and financial figures. All conferences reported a financial surplus. A loan of $35K to the 2001 VLSI Circuits Symposium was approved.
For technical cosponsored conferences, the AdCom reviewed BCTM, GaAsIC, and ISLPED. The SSCS agreed to provide technical cosponsorship in 2001 for each of these conferences. New technical cosponsorship for DAC and ICCAD was approved.
At the AdCom meeting, the Meetings Committee proposed a third level of sponsorship. When the SSCS "cooperates with" conferences and workshops, it will provide limited publicity for conferences and workshops. This allows the Society to cooperate with conferences and workshops that are already sponsored by other organizations, including SSCS chapters, which are valuable in certain geographic regions and/or subspecialties in the SSCS field of interest, although they may not be of primary interest to all our members.
Further progress toward providing DVDs of archival solid-state circuits articles and papers have been funded for 2001. Funding of $230,000 has enabled production to begin on a DVD of the ISSCC Digests from 1955 to 2000. The DVD will also include the JSSC 1966–2000. New and improved indexing will be included, along with citation linking. The DVD is expected to be available to members for purchase in the spring, with the material also ported over to the IEEEXplore database later in the year at www.ieee.org/ieeexplore.
The economic health of the Society has also enabled the funding of a second predoctoral fellowship. See "Liang Dai Awarded SSCS Predoctoral Fellowship" on page 7. Deadline for 2001–2002 applications is 15 May 2001. Look for the Awards button on the Society home page: www.ieee.org/sscs.
The AdCom approved $18,000 of subsidy applications for 17 Chapters, up from 14 last year. Additional money is also set aside for newly formed chapters to apply as they initiate their activities. The Chapters Committee selection of the Japan Chapter as recipient of the first SSCS Outstanding Chapter Award was also approved at this meeting. See the story on the cover of the October 2000 SSCS Newsletter.
Funding was approved for a survey in 2001 of Society membership satisfaction. The survey will examine ways of attracting new SSCS members and the climate of existing SSCS members. The IEEE Office of Institutional Research will conduct the survey.
To promote new memberships at the premier SSCS and EDS meetings, ISSCC, and IEDM, the AdCom voted to continue the $25 new membership voucher program.