NEMI, IEEE CPMT Society Join Forces
The National Electronics Manufacturing Initiative (NEMI, Herndon, VA), an industry-led consortium focused on strengthening the global electronics supply chain, and the IEEE Components, Packaging and Manufacturing Technology Society (CPMT, Piscataway, NJ) have entered into a formal agreement that outlines key areas of collaboration between the two organizations.
One of the primary collaborations under this new agreement will be roadmap development, beginning with the 2004 NEMI roadmap. The roadmaps, created every two years, map the future manufacturing needs of the electronics industry to identify the key technology and infrastructure developments required to assure leadership of the global supply chain over the next decade. It helps companies anticipate shifts in product requirements and provides an early warning of changes in technology or infrastructure.
The CPMT Society's members are technical professionals whose fields of expertise complement and substantially overlap with NEMI, and many CPMT Society members have represented their respective employers in the development of previous NEMI roadmaps. With more than 40% of the Society's members outside the U.S., the CPMT Society is committing experienced professionals from Europe, Asia and North America to many of the NEMI roadmap chapter committees.
Involvement of this broad-based group will help NEMI in its efforts to globalize the scope of the 2004 roadmap. Other areas of collaboration include NEMI involvement in CPMT Society-sponsored conferences, workshops and refereed publications, and CPMT Society coordination with the NEMI Technical Committee on development of research and development priorities.
"We have worked informally with the CPMT Society for many years, but wanted to form a more structured relationship with planned activities that would allow us to work together rather than just doing things on an opportunistic basis," said Jim McElroy, executive director and chief executive officer of NEMI.
Rolf Aschenbrenner, vice president of technical activities for the CPMT Society, said, "We also look forward to NEMI members presenting their work at CPMT Society workshops and conferences as well as soliciting papers for IEEE CPMT Transactions journals. In fact, we are already coordinating a NEMI tin whisker workshop as part of our Electronic Components and Technology Conference (ECTC) in Las Vegas this June."
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