The IEEE Reliability Society
Joint Section Chapter: Boston - New Hampshire - Providence

November 2014 – February 2015

Charles H. Recchia, Ph.D IEEE Senior Member Chair, IEEE Boston Reliability Chapter, joint with Providence, RI and New Hampshire

Greetings,

We had outstanding presentations with solid attendance to finish out 2014 in September through December. On Wednesday, September 10, at MIT Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington, MA, Kevin Foy presented, "Maintaining Quality & Reliability of a Complex Product through a Global Manufacturing Transfer," which detailed the quality and reliability aspects of moving leak detector builds from Lexington, Massachusetts to Malaysia.  On Wednesday, October 8, 2014, at Analog Devices in Wilmington, Andrew Olney’s proxy presented "Eliminating the Top Causes of Customer-Attributable Integrated Circuit Failures," a meeting conducted jointly with the IEEE Solid State Circuits Boston Chapter. On Wednesday, November 12, 2014, we met jointly with the Northeast Chapter of the ESD Association to learn from Andrew Kopanski of MIT Lincoln Laboratory speaking on the challenges of “ESD Control in a Laboratory Environment.” Finishing out the year, as part of our past Chairs Dinner, we were fortunate to have guest speaker Eli Brookner, an IEEE AESS Distinguished Lecturer, spoke on “Reliability as Impacted by Phased-Array and Radar Breakthroughs.”
The December 2014 year-end event doubled as the Chapter’s Annual Past Chairs Dinner in conjunction with the usual monthly meeting. The past chairs dinner recognizes on a yearly basis the erstwhile chairs of the IEEE Boston Reliability Chapter for their years of dedication and contributions to the chapter’s ongoing vitality and success. This meeting began, as typical, with informal social networking, followed by dinner & announcements, then the presentation by the keynote speaker, this year being the aforementioned Dr Brookner.

The New Year started out with an excellent joint meeting at MIT Lincoln Laboratory with The Northeast Chapter of the ESD Association and Ted Dangelmayer’s presentation entitled “Class 0 and Reliability ESD Case Studies,” featuring one case study highlighting the ever-increasing ESD challenges involving 22% failure rates despite having a good S20.20 program in place. After having survived late January’s “Snowpocalypse 2015,” we are looking forward to Tuesday February 10th‘s talk by MIT Microsystems Technology Laboratories Director Jesús A. del Alamo entitled “Recent Progress in Understanding the Electrical Reliability of GaN High-Electron Mobility Transistors,” followed by a Wednesday March 11th meeting featuring a presentation by our most recent former chair (2012-2014), Daniel Weidman, on addressing top-level system reliability via proper compilation of sub-system considerations.  Both meetings will be held at MIT Lincoln Laboratory.

If you are interested in presenting almost any technical topic, related to hardware or software, if it is related to reliability, please contact us for our Fall 2015 schedule, and/or suggest a topic on website sub-link “Suggest a Meeting Topic” http://ewh.ieee.org/r1/boston/rl/suggestform.html. 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 networking camaraderie, and introduce yourself to me. I hope to see you soon.

Regards,

Charles H. Recchia

More details on chapter related activities will soon be added to this newsletter at: http://www.ieee.org/bostonrel