Solid-State Circuits Society Is Volunteer Powered—
The CICC Case Study

SSCS and IEEE have uncovered, through member surveys this year, the fact that many members don’t realize that volunteers really do most of the work in IEEE. And many members say they would like to volunteer but don’t know how.

Conferences, chapters, and the Journal are all organized and produced with volunteer effort. This is the first in a series of SSCS newsletter articles about the volunteers behind the scenes; who they are, what they do, and how they got started. With these case studies readers may decide to seek places for themselves on these committed and engaged teams of technical professionals.

We’ll begin with interviews of volunteers for the Custom Integrated Circuits Conference (CICC), an annual SSCS conference with attendance of approximately 400 and a Technical Program Committee (TPC) of 79 members. For its 25th year CICC changed its meeting to the fall after 24 years of being held in May. “CICC stands by a simple mode of operation that is defined by ‘Innovation, Education, and Communication,’” points out General Chair, Phil Diodato.

How CICC Volunteers Got Started
Johan Van Der Tang used to visit several circuit conferences but until 2000 he hadn’t visited the IEEE CICC yet. “In that year I had a paper presentation on tunable filters and, if I recall it accurately, before and after the session members of the Technical Program Committee mentioned that they were looking for some new TPC members. I had just moved from Philips Research Eindhoven to Eindhoven University of Technology and thought it would be rewarding if I could join the TPC. Obviously, I enjoyed the high technical level of the conference. It is a wonderful opportunity to broaden one’s technical horizon. And this has a lot of synergy with being an assistant professor. Hence during one of the author interviews, I approached one of the TPC members, and after that I got an invitation to send in a CV and ended up being one of the freshmen of TPC 2001.”

Takayasu Sakurai of the University of Tokyo recalls his beginning involvement with the conference as a replacement for Dr. Susumu Kohyama from Toshiba “who nominated me to the CICC Steering Committee when he retired from the TPC of the CICC about fifteen years ago.”

Doug Garrity of Motorola, Education Sessions Chair in 2003, recalls that a friend of his, Allen Barlow, was serving as the Technical Program Chair in 1993. Garrity was attending the conference and talking with Barlow and just offered to help. “I knew that his was an incredibly difficult job and said if you need help with this, I’d be happy to help. And the next thing, I was busy.”

Trudy Stetzler of Texas Instruments, the 2003 Technical Program Chair, “attended CICC for several years, and had presented some educational sessions. I discussed with one of my friends who was on the TPC what it was like, and the responsibilities involved, and thought it would be an interesting experience. He introduced me to several of the steering team members, who asked me to send a resume for their review. The steering team invited me to join the CICC TPC.”

What Volunteers Do
Garrity points out, “Everybody has two CICC jobs. On the CICC TPC everyone serves on a topical subcommittee for paper review as well as being involved in one of the organizational committees, such as Educational Sessions or Publicity.”

Elliot Gould of Motorola says that, for most, “reviewing the papers is the biggest job.” Van Der Tang sees his primary task as being a member of the wired subcommittee. “The biggest part is encouraging people to send in papers and reviewing papers of your subcommittee. You rely on your network of people in the industry and colleagues you know from other universities. For example, I’ve spent five years at Philips Research and know a lot of people and their work within Philips. Hence I was successful several times in getting some submissions from Philips.”

Sakurai describes one of his rolls is “to promote public relations and to enhance visibility to attract more people to the conference.” He does this though his own “e-mail list, recommending information and sending it to NIKKEI and other press media.” He recruits papers simply by calling people and talking to them. The biggest part of his job is “reading papers and selecting good papers to make a technically attractive program.”
Stetzler describes how the conference comes together with each TPC member playing these double roles. “The conference TPC has two meetings, TPC-1 in January and TPC-2 in May prior to the conference. They are one day each. TPC-1 is mostly a planning meeting—identifying papers to invite and authors/companies to solicit for papers. The organizational committees also set their plans at this meeting, such as potential exhibiters and events, educational session tracks, potential speakers, panel topics, and potential panelists.” TPC-2 in May is primarily dedicated to paper selection.

What Happens in the Panel and Education Committees
Jafar Savoj from UCLA says the biggest job of the Panel Sessions Chair is “to come up with a comprehensive list of panel topics, and to help find good panelists to speak on the selected panels. Most of the ideas are collected from the surveys that go to the TPC members before our first meeting. On some occasions, unanswered questions in one panel give rise to new panel topics. Also, some suggestions come from individuals or companies who want to introduce a new trend in IC technology.”

From a list of 100 suggestions, the Panel Committee members select their top ten and narrow the list. Then Savoj presents the top picks to the TPC and collects their vote. “We pick the three panels with the highest number of votes to be presented at the conference. Then we invite the individuals who have either established a reputation for their contributions to the topic or work for the companies that lead the related technologies. The panel moderators and the panel committee members try to identify these experts. We invite people who have published on the topic and people who are responsible for making strategic decisions.”

“We are looking for volunteers who give us new ideas for the panels, like to present their strong opinion as a panelist, or put us in touch with people who are excellent candidates to sit on a panel. The primary job of a panel member is to educate the audience. He or she should be able to present an in-depth analysis of the topic and provide a very clear vision. The panelist should be able to respond to the questions from the audience and defend his or her ideas,” Savoj points out.

Garrity, as Education Committee Chair, cautions that “We rarely take somebody who just comes in and says here’s an idea for an Ed session that we can give and we’ll do a great job. It has to be somebody we know is technically proficient and who also is an excellent speaker. There is an Education Subcommittee of fifteen people where basically we come up with topics and speakers and we focus on those choices. There is always a mix between getting the right speakers and getting all the right topics we want. There are some people that could come and talk about whatever they wanted because they’re excellent speakers and are a big draw.”

The Steering Committee asks a member of the TPC to serve as an organizational or session chair. The job of an organizational chair for any of the committees is a two-year commitment.

What Happens in the Paper Review Committees
Stetzler describes the process. “The reviewers receive the papers submitted to the conference about three weeks before the second TPC meeting in late May. They then must read all the papers for their subcommittee and evaluate them for technical merit, originality, clarity, and significance. Some of the subcommittees get quite a few papers, so this is usually a busy time for the reviewers. They must send their scores to the subcommittee chair usually a couple of days before TPC-2 so the chair can combine them all into one spreadsheet for review at TPC-2. TPC-2 is the final discussion and selection of the papers. This is the meeting where the entire technical program is put together—number of sessions, total papers per session, which sessions are on which day—everything needed for the advanced program.”

The number of papers per topical subcommittee ranges from 45 to about 65. Paper submissions increased by 50% for the 2003 conference but even the Wireless subcommittee, with the high of 68 papers, was “still manageable.” Stetzler points out that “The number of papers is something we watch …if it does get too high, we may need to rethink how the committees are partitioned and perhaps change the partitioning.”

Gould offers more insights into the paper selection process. “The majority of the papers that are rejected simply fall short in one or more of the scoring categories (technical merit, clarity, originality, and significance) making them, by definition, not very interesting pieces of work. Some good papers are rejected because there may be a lot of very good papers that year, and they simply missed the cut. Other papers that are good may be off topic from the themes that develop as the conference program is created. Most of the time though, if the paper is good, we find a way to include it in the conference,” Gould observed.

“All the reviews are unbiased,” Stetlzer continues. “For example, if the paper is from TI, I don’t vote on the paper and I leave the room for all the discussions (to allow an unbiased discussion).” Gould agrees, “Everyone who I have interacted with at the CICC has been nothing but very professional about conflicts of interest. Everyone goes out of their way to ensure they cannot be accused of favoring their allegiances.” Van Der Tang continues, “For me region is irrelevant. Technical content, merit, and, hopefully, some incremental or stepwise advancement of science is of importance.”

Why Volunteers Enjoy Volunteering
All agree that it is the people they work with on CICC that provide the most satisfaction. Garrity is pleased to have “gotten to rub shoulders with all of the top analog design people in the world at one time or another from being associated with this conference.” Van der Tang quotes Newton, “‘We are standing on the shoulders of a giant.’ Open literature and knowledge, conferences like the CICC contribute to that and it is nice to be part of that.”

Garrity also resonates with some fundamental organizational choices of the conference. “CICC gets four pages for digest submission, not one page of text and one page of illustrations like some other conferences. The CICC tagline says it is about education. It is the place to learn how to do your job better, versus other conferences that are a place companies go to say this is what we do.”

Savoj credits organizing panels as helping him “to learn about what people think will come up in the industry, and how research and development in the fast-paced solid-state circuits society may evolve in the coming years.”

Real Jobs and Volunteer Jobs
Stetzler’s employer views her CICC activity as “a useful career growth opportunity for me, as well as a benefit to TI to have someone from the company invited to be a part of the Technical Program Committee. The conference itself is a useful learning and educational event. They support the travel to the meetings and the conference as well as that time away from my ‘real’ job. Of course, there are still many additional hours required outside of this time away that are a commitment on my part to help make CICC a successful conference. TI does get some recognition out of having a person on the technical program committee.”

Gould’s management requires him to annually justify why his participation is useful enough to the employer to support him. Gould prefers “to think of this work as falling into the general ‘education’ category. The CICC provides a unique educational opportunity in many dimensions. First, it has wonderful educational sessions before the conference. Second, the conference papers are very technical, typically containing circuit-level detail. And the EDA vendors always come exhibit, providing a close, intimate setting to interact with them versus DAC, which has a bigger exhibit.”

Personally, Gould enjoys “forcing” himself to “delve deeply into engineering subject matters that are outside my immediate area of expertise through the paper review process.”

Sakurai agrees that without CICC, his busy schedule would prevent him from sparing the time to read papers, accessing “their practical yet first-class technical achievements.” Van der Tang credits the in-depth reading of the papers required for the selection process as providing him an opportunity to “acquire a lot of insight and new ‘circuit tricks’.”

How Should a Newcomer Get Started?
During the CICC all committee members wear white ribbons. If you are interested, “just make your interest clear to one of those persons. I think the contact info on the Web page of the CICC (www.ieee.cicc.org) is also a possibility,” Van Der Tang advises. Stetzler agrees, “contact any member of the steering team to find out what the responsibilities are and the commitment that they are required to make. We usually ask for a resume to see how the individual would fit in with the current technical program committee.”

Sakurai is interested in nominating more participants from his region who would increase the papers and attendance at CICC. For the Far East region, he relies on the local custom of semiconductor companies recommending a representative.

The best time for volunteering to join the TPC is during and immediately after the conference occurs. For the 2004 conference, Diodato reports that the committee staffing was almost done by mid-November. Certainly suggesting panel topics after the advance program has gone out is too late. Savoj indicates those late summer “suggestions will be added to the list of topics for the following year. The topics of our panels are selected in January and the list of panelists is finalized by June of every year.”

Van der Tang concludes about his involvement in CICC TCP that, “the benefits outweigh the invested time by an order of a magnitude.”

Anne O’Neill
SSCS Executive Director
a.oneill@ieee.org