SEMI-THERM 27 Attendance Underscores the Importance of Thermal Management

By Ron Molnar, AZ Tech Direct

The 27th annual IEEE Semiconductor Thermal Measurement, Modeling and Management (SEMI-THERM) Symposium was held March 20 - 24, 2011, in San Jose, CA. This marked the first year that MEPTEC co-located its annual one-day thermal packaging workshop with the SEMI-THERM event.

The 5-day event showed increases in attendance and course offerings across the board over 2010. It attracted 198 symposium attendees (up 43%) to 44 short courses (up 83%) and 486 total registered attendees (up 66% over 2010). There were 38 exhibitors (up 31% over 2010), reported Tom Tarter, Exhibitor and Conference Manager, and President of Package Science Services, LLC.

"SEMI-THERM 27 demonstrated, through increased symposium and exhibition attendance, that the electronics industry is recovering from the downturn over the last several years and that the thermal management aspects of the industry remain of high importance. The recovery also led to a significant increase in the number of exhibitors, maintaining SEMI-THERM as the premier venue for displaying and introducing new electronics thermal management products and services." noted Bernie Siegal, President of Thermal Engineering Associates, Inc, and Steering Committee Operations Chair.

Keynote speaker, William Chen of ASE Group, kicked-off the event with a provocative presentation titled, "Engineering the Packaging Revolution." Jim Wilson of Raytheon was honored with the prestigious 2011 THERMI Award for his contributions to the field, and Dirk Schweitzer of Infineon Technologies AG received the Harvey Rosten Award for Excellence for his paper.

"The conference had an impressive turnout of attendees from various parts of the world e.g. North America, Asia (Hong Kong, Taiwan, China, Japan, Korea, and India) and Europe (Russia, Poland, Germany, Turkey, Belgium, Hungary, and the Netherlands)." remarked General Chair, Sai Ankireddi, PhD., Sr. Principal Engineer at Intersil Corp., "The participation by these engineers, technologists and scientists from all over at this annual symposium is testament to SEMI-THERM's truly international stature, and to its position as the de-facto forum for practical knowledge and experience sharing in the areas of thermal measurement, management and modeling."