It is clearly a good thing when two of the industry's best organizations decide to work together.

The National Electronics Manufacturing Initiative (NEMI) and the IEEE Components, Packaging and Manufacturing Technology (CPMT) Society have entered into a formal agreement to collaborate in certain areas. Foremost among these is in roadmap development. NEMI puts out an industry roadmap every two years, and the CPMT Society will be working with NEMI formally on the 2004 version that is underway.

NEMI is a consortium focused on strengthening the global supply chain in the electronics industry, and an increase in the input from the CPMT Society will certainly help this effort. CPMT is one of the most prestigious professional organization in the packaging community, so the many experts in that group should have some useful input on the NEMI documents intended to guide the industry into the future.

One benefit of the collaboration will be an increased globalization of NEMI's work. Since 40 percent of the CPMT membership is outside of the United States, there should be good representation of international inputs in NEMI's work now.

The specific collaborative efforts will include NEMI workshops at the Electronic Components Technology Conference (ECTC). This IEEE CPMT event is the largest technical conference on packaging and related issues, so it will be an excellent opportunity for NEMI to begin spreading the word about its activities and gathering input from the extended community.

Every time I look around through the website of an organization like NEMI or page through some proceedings, I learn about some project that I didn't know was being carried out by that organization. I often wonder if that group is aware of some related work going on somewhere. I'm sure that they are aware of each other's work in most cases, but it can only help when significant groups like NEMI and the CPMT Society decide to collaborate. At the very least, they can benefit from some new ideas that now have an easier path to flow between the two groups. At the risk of sounding like a marketing person, it sounds like a "win-win" to me.

-Jeffrey C. Demmin, contributing editor