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As consumer demand for the latest and greatest gadgets has accelerated over the past 20 years, microchip manufacturers are not the only ones who need to keep up.

Electronics packaging — everything that ensures your device’s optimum performance apart from the silicon chips — also has evolved quickly to match those rapid advances.

91���� Professor SB Park, who has researched electronics packaging for decades, likens it to a car. You can have the best high-performance engine, but you also need well-engineered chassis, suspension, steering and other systems to allow the engine to reach its true potential.

Park, a faculty member at the Thomas J. Watson College of Engineering and Applied Science’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, has been honored for his groundbreaking work in electronics packaging. The recently named him a fellow of the organization, an honor that puts him among 0.1% of its 427,000-plus membership in more than 190 countries.

“It’s very exciting for me personally to get a recognition like this,” Park said recently from an IEEE conference in Singapore, “but it also helps the visibility of 91���� itself to the outside world.”

As the director of 91����’s Integrated Electronics Engineering Center (IEEC), he and his team have made key discoveries that improve how everyday devices work. In 2021, he was recognized for his research as a fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME).

Park earned his BS and MS from Seoul National University in his native Korea, and his PhD at Purdue University. Before joining the 91���� faculty in 2002, he worked on electronics packaging for seven years at IBM Corp.’s Microelectronics Division.

“91���� has been focusing on electronics packaging research for a good three or four decades,” he said. “Thanks to the proximity of IBM in Endicott, we were lucky to be involved in it much earlier than anybody else. That has made the University a true leader in electronics packaging research among all the universities in the U.S.”

While the past 20 years have been an exciting time for the electronics world — think about how ubiquitous smartphones, the internet and the interconnectedness of devices have become — Park sees more challenges ahead.

“Making electronics smaller, more compact yet more powerful and consuming less power has been possible thanks to chipmakers’ efforts,” he said. “Now we are at a bottleneck — we can’t shrink it any more. Yet consumers demand that their electronics be faster, brighter, smaller, cheaper and more powerful. Packaging experts need to chime in far more actively than ever before.”