he 2025 PSMA Planning Meeting was held on Sunday, October 5, 2025, at the Grand Hyatt San Antonio Riverwalk in San Antonio, TX with both in person and virtual attendees representing the PSMA Board of Directors, PSMA Committees and other PSMA members. The purpose of the Planning Meeting was to review where the Association stands today, discuss outstanding issues and to identify possible new programs and projects that promise to bring value to the membership.

President Renee Yawger welcomed all the attendees and reviewed the agenda for the meeting. Chair Trifon Liakopolous talked about the state of PSMA and our future vision to become an industry support leader and strategic partner. He focused on how PSMA can strengthen its value proposition and evolve from individual engagement to corporate alignment. He reviewed the discussion from the 2025 Annual Meeting when it was agreed that PSMA needs to grow to remain relevant and he revealed a prospective budget allocation strategy with surplus funds allocated to marketing and public relations, new special projects, and maintaining a strategic reserve to protect against any downturns in the global economy. There was a great deal of discussion following Trifon's presentation, and many members voiced their views.

Financial Forecast
Tim McDonald, Secretary/Treasurer, presented the latest 6-Quarter financial forecast. The financial state of PSMA is strong – there is a healthy cash reserve, and we have recently funded several major projects. Tim said that funding is available for new projects and encouraged all committees to think of special projects that can add value to PSMA.

Committee Reports
Following the Financial Forecast the individual committees were all given an opportunity to present the upcoming needs for each of them. The focus was on what the committees need to go forward rather than on looking back at the activities the committees had engaged in since the last Planning Meeting.

Several committees are planning workshops for the coming year, including Packaging and Manufacturing (several workshops), Semiconductor (a potential pre-APEC workshop in 2027) and Energy Harvesting (the fourth EnerHarv workshop). The Magnetics Committee said they are investigating expanding their workshop offering, currently they present a workshop prior to APEC, they would like to expand that to have additional workshops going forward. In addition, some of the committees expressed a need to invigorate their committee with new members and there was discussion on how to bring new contributing members to the committees.

Planning Discussions
After the Committee reports the discussion turned to planning and future direction. Ada Cheng offered a vision of expanding the Student Attendance Support to give the students more money so they could better attend all of APEC rather than just attending their session. There was agreement that increased funding was desirable but only if the other sponsors (IEEE IAS and IEEE PELS) are willing to step up as well. There was a request for new Chairs to lead the Power Technology Roadmap Committee. The Executive Committee led a discussion on how to evaluate Special Project requests based on the current financial status of PSMA; this discussion was prompted by a suggestion from George Slama to the Executive Committee.

PSMA members can view the minutes of the Planning Meeting on the "Members Only" section of the PSMA web site.

There was also a tour of the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center the afternoon before the planning meeting. Based on the continued dedication of the APEC Technical Program Committee, we can all look forward to a very interesting and successful APEC 2026.

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