"The Commonwealth of Virginia's New Hybrid Regulatory Model (or How to pay for a new Nuclear Plant) "

The IEEE Richmond Section will be meeting jointly with the Virginia Section of the American Nuclear Society for our September meeting. The meeting will be held at Dominion's Innsbrook Technical Center at 5000 Dominion Blvd., Glen Allen, VA 23060 on Thursday, 20 September 2007. The Social starts at 5:30 PM, Dinner at 6:15 PM and Talk at 7:00 PM. Mr. J. Clayton Crouch Dominion Virginia Power Manager - Regulatory Data Management & Analysis will present "The Commonwealth of Virginia's New Hybrid Regulatory Model (or How to pay for a new Nuclear Plant) ". Reservations for the Meeting must be made by noon, Tuesday September 18, 2007 at http://local.ans.org/virginia/meetings/2007/crouch.html. Please note your IEEE affiliation when registering. Please indicate if you are a student.

This presentation will provide an overview of Senate Bill 1416 that passed in the Virginia Legislative session earlier this year. The Bill was a landmark shift in the de-regulation direction that many states including Virginia had embarked on over the past decade. The new law has been called a "Hybrid Regulatory Model" because it combines the best of Traditional Cost of Service Ratemaking with Performance Based Rates to ensure the added efficiency gains made recently are maintained and will be monitored by the VA SCC.

In addition to performance incentives, an adjustment clause or "rider" allows for cost recovery of new baseload generation plant costs in the Commonwealth. This rider is filed with the VA SCC and will provide an added return on equity associated with the construction of North Anna 3.

Tour of VCU Microelectronics Center

The IEEE Richmond Section will be touring the VCU Microelectronics Center and its clean room on Thursday, 24 May 2007. Registration starts at 5:15 PM at the VCU School of Engineering Building One, 601 West Main Street, Richmond, VA. Please register for the meeting at www.ieee.org/richmond.

IEEE Richmond Section News

Our April Section meeting will be held on Monday, 30 April at the VCU School of Engineering starting at 5:30 PM. The topic of our meeting will be a Student Poster Contest. The contest is open to IEEE student members who attend school in the Richmond Section area. Cash prizes will be awarded in the under-graduate and graduate student categories.

The IEEE Richmond Section mourns the death of Barton B. Cregger, Associate Dean of the VCU School of Engineering, who died Tuesday, 27 March 2007. He was 49. Bart had reached 30 years of active IEEE service this year. He joined IEEE in 1978 as a student member, and became a "full" member of the IEEE in 1982 after completing graduate studies at the University of Virginia. A memorial service for Dean Cregger will be held at 4:00 p.m. Monday, 9 April in the VCU School of Engineering auditorium. Bart is survived by his wife, Norma, his stepdaughter, Julia Atalla, and her husband, Michael Atalla. A scholarship has been established in Bart's memory. Contributions can be sent to Barton B. Cregger Scholarship Fund, P.O. Box 843068, Richmond, Virginia 23284.

"Semiconductor Thermal Packaging - the Moving Frontier"

Revolutionary and evolutionary advances in thermal packaging technology have underpinned the continuous improvement in the performance, packaging density, and reliability achieved in solid state electronic products. Rising chip heat fluxes and packaging density, driven by Moore’s Law, have necessitated ever more aggressive cooling techniques, capable of reducing the junction-to-ambient thermal resistance, while meeting the cost, volume, and weight constraints appropriate to each class of electronic equipment. As these needs have escalated, attention has shifted from the external packaging levels towards the module and board level, then the package level, and is today focused on heat removal at the chip level. Current trends suggest that on-chip hot spots will drive the choice of future thermal packaging technology. Applicable thermal management techniques and their potential for hot spot remediation, including thermoelectric microcoolers, anisotropic spreaders/TIMs, and direct cooling with dielectric liquids through thin film evaporation or pool boiling, will be considered.The meeting will be held at Qimonda at 6000 Technology Blvd., Sandston, VA at 5:30 PM. Guests should register at www.ieee.org/richmond.

EWeek 2007 Just Around the Corner (18-24 Feb.)

IEEE-USA will again play a key role in activities surrounding Engineers Week 2007, 18-24 Feb. Festivities get underway in Washington, D.C., with Discover Engineering Family Day at the National Building Museum on 17 Feb. And IEEE-USA is sponsoring the Best Communications System Award and the essay question for the 15th anniversary of the EWeek Future City Competition in Washington. IEEE-USA also helped with the proposal that led to the IEEE becoming a major sponsor of the new engineering-based PBS television show, Design Squad, which launches during EWeek. Check with your local IEEE Section to see how you can participate in EWeek 2007.

The IEEE Richmond Section will be celebrating Engineers Week 2007at the Richmond Joint Engineers' Council (RJEC) banquet 22 February at the Jefferson Hotel in Richmond, VA. The guest speaker at the banquet will be LTG Carl A. Strock, Chief of Engineers and Commanding General U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The IEEE Richmond Section will also be participating in "Career Day" at the Science Museum of Virginia in Richmond.

Helicopters and Power

Dominion Virginia Power has partnered with Chesapeake Bay Helicopters to develop one of the most sophisticated electronic surveillance helicopters in the world. By combining the highest
quality sensors available to detect potential problems with high-voltage transmission lines, Dominion has greatly improved the efficiency of inspecting lines to further increase the reliability of service to electric customers. The helicopter can also perform extremely acurate aerial surveying with the onboard LIDAR system and GPS system. One of the most challenging aspects of the project has been handling the terabytes of data gathered in the imagery and survey data.

Rachel O'Donnell, a Technical Specialist at Dominion, will present "Helicopters and Power" to the IEEE Richmond Section at their Thursday, 1 February 2007 meeting. The meeting will be held a the Hilton Garden Inn at Innsbrook in Glen Allen, VA at 5:30 PM. The meeting is open to the public. Guests should register at www.ieee.org/richmond.

NanoWires: The New Nanoelectronics

Professor Supriyo Bandyopadhyay, Virginia Commonwealth University, will be the speaker at the IEEE Richmond Section's Thursday, 4 January 2007 monthly meeting. The dinner meeting will start at 5:30 PM at the Hilton Garden Inn at Innsbrook. Reservations can be made at http://www.ieee.org/richmond/.

The workhorse of modern electronics is the celebrated “transistor” which serves as the building block of all digital and analog circuits. However, as transistor dimensions shrink, a host of complicating issues begins to emerge that detracts from the transistor’s performance. They can only be mitigated with mounting costs. It therefore behooves us to seek alternate paradigms for computing and signal processing that bypasses the transistor paradigm. In one example, the pixel intensities of a grey scale image are encoded in the voltage states of individual nanowires. The nanowires are then allowed to interact and the final steady state voltages are de-encoded into pixel intensities. The final pixel intensities represent edge enhancement detection. Thus, the array of nanowires can perform useful image processing functions. Many other such examples will be presented.

Dr. Supriyo Bandyopadhyay is a professor of electrical and computer engineering and a professor of physics at Virginia Commonwealth University. He directs the Quantum Device Laboratory engaged in research on nanostructured devices and systems. Prof. Bandyopadhyay is the current chair of the IEEE Nanotechnology Council Technical Committee on Spintronics and the IEEE Electron Device Society Technical Committee on Compound Semiconductor Devices and Circuits. He is also the Chair of the Regional Interest Group of the IEEE Nanotechnology Council and Vice President (Conferences) Elect of the Nanotechnology Council of the IEEE. He is profiled in numerous Who ’s Who and is a Fellow of the IEEE, American Physical Society, the Institute of Physics (UK),the Electrochemical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.