C.P. Wong, Professor of Materials Science & Engineering and Adjunct Professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, to receive IEEE award, 2006 IEEE Components, Packaging and Manufacturing Technology Award. Wong has pioneered new materials from polymers to nano-technologies.

The ongoing trend toward faster and smaller electronics is a significant challenge for engineers who design electronic packaging. C. P. Wong is an industry legend who fundamentally changed semiconductor packaging technology, pioneering new materials ranging from polymers to nano-technologies. His profound affect on this field has led to his being honored with the 2006 IEEE Components, Packaging and Manufacturing Technology Award.

Sponsored by the IEEE Components, Packaging and Manufacturing Technology Society, the award recognizes meritorious contributions to the advancement of components, electronic packaging or manufacturing technologies. It will be presented to Wong on June 1 at the 56th IEEE Electronic Components and Technology Conference in San Diego, California.

Wong dramatically reduced the cost of manufacturing very large volumes of the high- performance electronic components widely used in today's telecommunications, computer networks and other consumer electronics areas. While a staff member at AT&T Bell Labs in Princeton, New Jersey, he pioneered the use of silicone gel and other polymers as a device encapsulant, allowing AT&T to save tens of millions of dollars in manufacturing costs. In the late 1980s, he was instrumental in initiating the use of more reliable and economical, non-hermetic polymeric materials over conventional hermetic ceramic packages at the IEEE Gel Task Force which consisted of a dozen major U.S. military suppliers and the U.S. Air Force Rome These plastic packages have saved hundreds of millions of dollars to the U.S. military qualified electronic components.

Wong and his students developed the first known no-flow underfill materials for high performance flip-chip applications. They also developed a high-performance electrical conductive adhesive (ECA) and solved the industry-wide conductivity fatigue problem by demonstrating that dealing
with corrosion is the key to assuring stable ECA contact resistance, recently he and his students have demonstrated the use of self assembly layer nano-materials as molecular wires to enhance the current transport of the ECA and the use of carbon nano-tubes for electrical and thermal managements of high performance packages.

Regents and Distinguished Professor and holder of the Charles Smithgall Institute Endowed Chair at the School of Materials Science and Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, he has published more than 500 technical papers, granted over 40 US Patents and authored or co-authored four definitive books on the subjects of polymeric materials and packaging technologies.

An IEEE Fellow, he is past president of the IEEE Components, Packaging and Manufacturing Technology Society and received its Outstanding Sustained Technical Contributions Award. He also received the IEEE Educational Activities Board Meritorious Achievement Award in Continuing Education and the IEEE Third Millennium Medal. He was a Fellow of AT&T Bell Labs and is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering.

Wong received his bachelor's and master's degrees in chemistry from Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, and his doctoral degree in chemistry from Pennsylvania State University in University Park and was also a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University in California.

The IEEE is the world's largest technical professional society. Through its 365,000 members in 150 countries, the society is a leading authority on a wide variety of areas ranging from aerospace systems, computers and telecommunications to biomedical engineering, electric power and consumer electronics. Dedicated to the advancement of technology, the IEEE publishes 30 percent of the world's literature in the electrical and electronics engineering and computer science fields, and has developed more than 900 active industry standards. The organization also sponsors or co-sponsors more than 300 international technical conferences each year.

For more information contact:
Francine Tardo (+1 732 465 5865)
f.tardo@ieee.org