Society News

The Joint-Section Chapter for Boston / New Hampshire / Providence has continued to have well attended monthly meetings, each of which consists of networking and then a presentation by a guest speaker. In February, we had our own Aaron DerMarderosian, Jr. of Raytheon, and past Chapter Chair, who presently serves as our IEEE Reliability Chapter Secretary, presenting "Counterfeit Analysis & Prevention - Detection & QC Non-Conformance Issues; Hardware & Data Destruction Assured Domestic Electronics Recycling." In March, we had a joint presentation with the ESDA (Electrostatic Discharge Association) about "Next Generation ESD Scanning Techniques for Protection Circuit Analysis and Debug." This presentation addressed the particularly insidious "soft" ESD failures, which may pass testing and show up as failures later, in contrast to hard ESD failures, which can be identified during testing. This presentation included interesting videos of a unique testing technique to identify "weak" locations in a circuit that may be prone to ESD failures. In April we had a presentation by Bert Farabaugh, the Worldwide Field Applications Engineering Manager for RTI (Real-Time Innovations), which is the world's largest embedded middleware provider. He presented, "Increasing Data Availability and Reliability using Data Distribution Service for Real-Time Systems (DDS)." On May 14, we will have Leslie Gabriele return, for the first time in several years, to speak about "Personal Power and the Art of Perception." On June 11, Dr. David I. Heimann will return to provide us with an update on "A Guide to the Revised IEEE 730 Software Quality Assurance Standard." As well as being the first time in three years having had a presentation in January, this will also be the first time in three years, or more, since we have had a June presentation.

We plan to take a break this summer, and resume with our monthly meetings in September. If you are interested in presenting almost any technical topic, related to hardware or software, if it is (or can be) related to reliability, please contact us. If you are local to the Boston area, or if you are in the Boston area the second Wednesday of the month, please attend our meeting, enjoy the camaraderie, and introduce yourself to me. I hope to see you soon.

Visit our chapter's monthly newsletter to find more details of our activities.

Best regards,
Dr. Dan Weidman
Chair, IEEE Boston Reliability Chapter, joint with Providence, RI and New Hampshire