President's Message
As the first President elected from Region 8 (Europe, Africa and Middle East) it is a great honor and privilege to serve for 2008 and 2009 as President of the Electron Devices Society. Being a volunteer since 1995 and having enjoyed serving in a variety of positions I am well familiar with the objectives of the Society aiming at giving value to it members. It is a privilege, but at the same time a great challenge, as many things are rapidly changing since electronic communication has entered the scene, offering great new possibilities which were not available before. Strategies set out by the Junior and Senior Past Pesidents, Ilesanmi Adesida and Hiroshi Iwai, respectively, will be further worked out, fine-tuned and adopted where needed in order to enhance benefits for Society members. The key question to answer is how we can best serve our members today and in the future, both from a professional and personal perspective. The fact that the Society is financially healthy enables us to start-up new initiatives and focus on serving our members. The Field of Interest of the Society has been updated and is now taking into account emerging technologies required for news applications fields such as environmental control, automotives, ambient intelligence, domotics, health care, infotainment, renewable energy, etc. Electron Devices has been and will remain open for new device technologies entering the research era. To cover the three main lines of the Research Agenda, i.e., More Moore (scaling), Beyond CMOS (spintronics, quantum computing, molecular electronics, bio-chips, carbon nanotubes, grapheme, etc), and More Than Moore (heterogeneous integration, 3D wafer level packaging, etc) , the Society members are becoming more multi-disciplinary, which should also be reflected in the Society key activities such as publications and conferences. EDS should become a home base for this new type of engineer. In order to get a much better feeling of the expectations of the individual members and non-members, a survey was developed and will have been distributed via e-mail prior to the mailing of this newsletter issue. This initiative is considered as very important and of great value for determining the future orientation of the Society and the technical fields to be covered. A key aspect of the Society is the Globalization strategy, which was initiated several years ago and resulted in a large number of new Chapters in countries like China and India. Both countries are important because of their increasing activities in the field of semiconductor research and manufacturing. Once the momentum is given, the action continues almost automatically. The focus is not only on Region 10, but much action is also on going to form new Chapters in Region 9. Additional initiatives will also be taken for the other Regions. In 2007, 18 new Chapters were formed and discussions are on going with about 40 potential new Chapters. Currently, we have 142 Chapters worldwide, making Electron Devices one of the most active societies within IEEE from a Chapters point of view. We all know that not only the number of Chapters is important, but essential is the degree to which these Chapters are active and serving the members. I am therefore very pleased to notice that there is a strong increase in the use of the Distinguished Lecturer (DL) Program and that more and more mini-colloquia are organized. This necessitated increasing the budget for these activities. Similar to 2007, the subsidy to the chapters will again be 50% higher this year. The globalization effect is also reflected in the increase of non USA members in the different administrative and technical committees. One of the two annual EDS Executive and Administrative Committee meetings is always held outside the United Stated. This year the mid-year meeting will be in Athens, Greece, while for 2009, it is scheduled to take place in India. Great successes of the Society are the Conferences and Workshops. Last year, EDS supported 124 conferences, including 22 financially sponsored ones. The Vice Presidents of Meetings and Technical Activities are working on researching and gathering information to get to better view on the topics covered, the geographical distribution, the meeting calendars and the success of the meetings. A strategy will be worked out to streamline the conferences offered and to avoid too much overlap and/or overkill. The above-mentioned membership survey will be used to detect new or emerging technical areas which could be addressed in the future. The Society has over the years been strongly interacting with the academic world and that community is well convinced of the benefits of joining the Society. Last year a new Education Award was established. Different initiatives are in place to increase the involvement of students and several new student chapters were formed last year. The Fellowship Program is available to both Graduate and Master students. However, it is as important for the Society to establish strong interactions with the industrial community and the engineers in the field. Initiatives are therefore taken to also better serve these members by organizing the appropriate type of events, to have them well represented in the different committees and to better inform them on their eligibility to be nominated for several of the existing awards. Similar actions are taken at the IEEE level as reflected in the increasing number of IEEE Fellows coming from industry. Along the same line, there will this year be a strong focus towards the Graduate of the Last Decade (GOLD) members. Within IEEE, EDS is playing a leading role. New initiatives presently under discussion are: a GOLD lecture linked to EDS conferences, an initiative that started at IEDM 2007 in Washington; setting-up an EDS GOLD committee: adding GOLD members to 20 EDS Standing and Technical committees; starting a GOLD Ambassadors Program which is basically an extension of the DL program; and, possibly establishing a dedicated award for Early Career Development of GOLD members. The flagship publications, IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices (TED), and IEEE Electron Device Letters (EDL), already have two of the leading submission to publication turnaround times as compared to the IEEE publications in their respective categories. In addition, for EDL, we started to perform the review process from ‘submission to publication’ electronically as of the first of the year. In the future, it is planned to have the T-ED review process performed online as well. Also more proceedings of EDS sponsored conferences are become accessible via IEEE Xplore and effort is taken to have also proceedings from previous years electronically accessible. Essential for the optimal operation of the Society is the support of all the volunteers and the staff members. As of the end of 2007, more than 650 volunteers were active within the Society. Their efforts and devotion to the Society, which are highly appreciated, are needed for the success of EDS and to make it the premiere Society within IEEE. As nowadays everybody is more and more under pressure to perform in an efficient manner, it is important that being a volunteer is also giving benefits for the professional career development and/or at the personal level. We will surely help the volunteers as much as we can. To better serve the existing members and to attract potential new members, it is essential to optimize the members’ benefits. The EDS Archival Collection on DVD, which includes all issues of Transactions on Electron Devices, Electron Device Letters and all digests of our flagship conference the International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM), has become very popular. EDS has an annual DVD Update Package which is compatible with the Archival Collection DVD, so EDS members always have available (on DVD and online) a full set of the core EDS articles published. The most recent action taken to increase member benefits was the announcement in the last quarter of 2007 of QuestEDS, the on-line feedback system allowing members to ask technical questions. Different EDS committees are working closely together to come up with new initiatives. Suggestions from individual members are more than welcome. Electron Devices is a great Society with enthusiastic volunteers and professional staff members and I am very confident that all together we will achieve our goals and even increase the value of membership. I will regularly report on the progress of the Society in the Newsletter. The Society is here for its members and all possible comments and suggestions that you may have will be discussed and taken into consideration. Let us go for it jointly.
Cor L. Claeys EDS President IMEC Leuven, Belgium |
