Young EE Prizewinners Span Continents, Cultures
By Margaret Quan, EE Times
May 17, 2002 (11:04)
URL: http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20020517S0046


Of the two recipients of this year's Outstanding Young Engineer Award from the IEEE Components Packaging Manufacturing Technology Society, one found it harder than the other to combat cultural prejudices about female career choices. But it wasn't the engineer who grew up in China; it was the one raised in Germany.

"Women can do everything in the new China," said Li Li, who is now a principal staff engineer at Motorola's Semiconductor Products Sector in Tempe, Ariz.

"Everyone wanted to talk me into studying languages instead [of physics]," said Christine Kallmayer, head of the Flex Circuit Applications lab at the Fraunhofer Institute, Berlin.

Li and Kallmayer may hail from different continents and cultures, but they share the same birth year and career trajectory, along with an expertise in electronics packaging technology. The two will be honored at the Components Packaging Manufacturing Technology (CPMT) Society luncheon during the Electronic Components and Technology Conference-the same event at which they met four years ago-held May 28-31 in San Diego, CA.

As part of the award, they will split a $1,500 cash prize and receive one-year free memberships in IEEE's CPMT Society. The Outstanding Young Engineer award goes to engineers who are under 35 years of age and who have been involved in the CPMT organization for at least three years.

The CPMT is recognizing Li for her contributions to flip-chip interconnect, bumping materials and process development, and embedded passive design and implementation in RF modules. Her service to the CPMT Society via conferences and IEEE Transactions publications was also cited. Kallmayer is being honored for her contributions to various packaging technologies including gold-tin solder interconnections and flex-based packages, and for her active participation in technical conferences sponsored by the CPMT Society.

Li, 34, works in a team of Motorola engineers who develop packaging for products such as Bluetooth transceiver modules. Originally from Shanghai, China, she speaks the ancient language of Mandarin, Shanghai's local dialect, as well as English and is the product of a new, more-open China, where it's not unusual for women to study engineering. According to Li, female students made up one-fourth of her engineering classes during the mid- to late-1980s.

Li found math and science pretty easy when she was young and thought that "it would be fun to build and design things that would benefit everyday life," she said. It may have been uncommon for Chinese women to study engineering in her mother's day, Li said, but not today.

Her role models included her father, a mechanical engineer who encouraged but didn't push her to follow in his footsteps, and her university advisers, who encouraged her to pursue a PhD in the United States, where there would be more research opportunities.

Li attended the University of Science and Technology in Beijing, where she earned bachelor's and master's degrees in materials science in 1988 and 1991, respectively. In 1991, she traveled to the United States to attend the State University of New York at Binghamton, where she earned a PhD in electrical engineering in 1995. She wrote her thesis on applied and basic studies of electrically conductive adhesives.

Li studied both electrical engineering and materials science because she thought a broad background was important-especially in the packaging field, which increasingly requires that engineers be multidisciplinary, she said.

Her graduate studies included a stint at the Swedish Institute of Research in Guttenberg, under a 1993 IEEE/ CPMT Motorola Fellowship award. She also did co-op work with Motorola Inc. in Schaumburg, Ill., beginning in 1994. Li said it was the fellowship and the work at Motorola that led her to Tempe after graduation. She and her husband, an EE at Medtronic Inc.'s Microelectronics Center in Tempe, have two children.

Li has two patents issued and three patents pending in the area of lead-free process interconnects for RF structures and flip-chip bump. She said she had no specific plans for the prize money but that she is sure it will be spent.

Material choices

Several thousand miles away in Berlin, Kallmayer said she was happy to hear she will share the award with Li, whom she knows, but was already fretting about the need to speak in public during the awards luncheon.

Kallmayer works on packaging technologies for microelectronics and on the assembly of electronic devices, as well as on microelectromechanical systems. At the Fraunhofer Institute, she said, the major concerns are choosing the right materials, optimizing the process technology and developing new products for international customers, including U.S. companies such as Motorola. Kallmayer's specialty is solder materials and adhesives.

Kallmayer, also 34, grew up in a small town near Kaiserslautern in southern Germany, near the French border, and knew she wanted to study physics from the age of 11. Her love for the subject came from a yearning to find answers to everyday mysteries, like why the sky is blue. In physics, she said, "you learn how to explain everything around you.”

"Her passion for the subject didn't waver even though she was discouraged in her studies by her parents, who were unsure what opportunities would be open to their daughter in the field. On top of that, Kallmayer said she had to overcome deeply ingrained beliefs that persist in German society about the appropriate jobs for women. Physics is not considered a woman's career and it's still unusual to find women physics students in Germany, she said.

Rare company

So Kallmayer duly completed her exams in French, as her parents and advisers suggested, in addition to math and physics before entering Kaiserslautern University. There, she was one of six women in her physics class of 60 students, and all of her professors were men.

But that's not the case at Fraunhofer, where she has worked since 1994-the same year Li signed on at Motorola. "There are quite a lot of women researchers at the institute, even women heading departments," Kallmayer said. Kallmayer's husband, also a physicist, works in the same department there, heading a group that develops flip-chip and assembly processes for transfer to production lines and industry.

Kallmayer said she plans to put the prize money into a house that she and her husband are building in Berlin, where she said land and construction are more expensive than in the United States.