Keeping Up

I don't know about you, but I feel like there are too many journals and books I want to read and too many conferences and courses I want to attend, but not enough time or money to do it all. These days, with non-sales business travel sometimes restricted, it is harder to get approval to attend classes or conferences. Yet, for packaging engineers as well as other participants in advanced technology, it's important to continually grow professionally and technically. Early signs are that a few new Web-based technologies may help with our dilemma.

The challenge in the packaging world is that we are simultaneously pushed from one side and pulled from the other. We must run faster and faster just to keep up with the dramatic changes from silicon technology in higher pin count, higher power dissipation, higher speed and lower junction temperature requirements. And we are pulled from the end-user side to reduce the footprint, increase the reliability, be compatible with legacy test and assembly technology and, oh, by the way, reduce the cost. And I forgot to mention that the product design cycle time is shrinking, so we have to find a solution that meets all the performance, manufacturing and cost specs, and get it right the first time.

The solutions to packaging's challenges lie in a combination of new designs, new processes, new tools and new materials. The key word here is new. How do we get up to speed with the state of the art and then keep up with the latest and greatest? In addition to the very important resources listed, I think the Web is beginning to offer us new alternatives. Though in their infancy, these resources have great potential. Two of them deserve special attention.

There is nothing more efficient for getting up to speed in a new field than taking a training class from an expert. The downside is that this generally requires travel to a distant city for two or more days. An alternative is Web-based training classes.

The most significant advance in Web-based classes was the announcement last April by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT, Cambridge, Mass.) of the OpenCourseWare (OCW) project. In its press release, MIT stated, "The website for MIT OCW will include material such as lecture notes, course outlines, reading lists and assignments for virtually all MIT courses across the Institute's entire curriculum — in architecture and planning, engineering, humanities, arts, social sciences, management, and science." Over the next two years, MIT expects to have the content from more than 500 different courses available on-line. As it matures, the OCW project could be a valuable tool for all technical professionals to enrich their basic engineering education, all from the convenience of their desks.

The IEEE CPMT Society is also making an effort to provide on-line educational materials specifically targeted to packaging engineers (www.cpmt.org/education/index.html). Though in an early phase, there are four nearly complete modules up and running, with another five in development. In one module, you can watch the effect on a substrate as an Nd:YAG laser pulse blasts a microvia.

When you want to keep up with the moving target of the state of the art, on-line seminars offer an alternative to being there. The main application of Webcasts today is for corporations to broadcast analyst meetings to the investor community and provide audiovisual-based press releases. However, there is a growing trend to apply this medium to technical seminars.

The two largest providers of free technical Webcast seminars, TechOnLine and ENEN, list more than 100 different archived seminars that can be viewed at your desk. Some of them have video along with the audio feed and slides. Though the topic range is broad, there are a few seminars related to packaging and interconnects. I recently presented a Webcast on signal integrity of interconnects that can be viewed on ENEN. Many other Web portals are beginning to post on-line seminars. Electronic Packaging & Production magazine (a sister publication to Semiconductor International) has posted three Webcasts specifically related to packaging and assembly issues.

Taking a class on the Web or attending a seminar as a Webcast are not substitutes for being there. However, when time is a precious commodity, the 30 second overhead of logging on is a small price to pay for the opportunity to participate with the industry, moving up the learning curve.

For additional information on assembly and packaging, go to www.semiconductor.net/assembly