The semiconductor industry is rapidly evolving and changing. Consolidations, mergers and acquisitions in the entire supply chain, the end of Moore’s Law (as we knew it), and the success of the foundry model has led us to seek new directions and expansions for The ConFab. Concurrent with our 2017 change in venue from Las Vegas to San Diego, we will be making some changes to The ConFab program. Mainstream semiconductor technology will still be a central focus, but we will be adding speakers, panelists, and VIP attendees from other growing and emerging areas and feature some of the other solid-state device technologies derived from semiconductor manufacturing. This will be from both the device maker and the equipment supplier perspective.
More emphasis will be placed on the MEMS and sensors, power devices, RF and analog mixed-signal, LEDs, thin film batteries, biomedical and other related technologies and markets. The mobile, medical and healthcare, the IoT, automotive, big data, cloud computing, flexible electronics, and virtual reality industries will be of high importance to The ConFab.
With regard to mainstream semiconductor manufacturing, speakers and panels on advanced packaging, including heterogeneous integration, will serve to tie together memory/logic/ASIC semiconductor devices into packages that can include: MEMS, RF, mixed-signal, thin-film battery and other components together, either on wafers or panels. The emerging technologies of silicon photonics and advanced memory, such as phase change and resistive RAM, will become a focus of The ConFab. Our customary speakers on industry forecasts and business directions will still be a part of The ConFab, but will be increased to reflect other markets beyond ICs.
These changes that will be incorporated will allow for the addition of new attendees and VIP’s from the supply chains that serve the other adjacent solid-state technologies and allow for additional private meeting and networking opportunities for current and previous ConFab attendees and sponsors. We will seek to cover as much as possible for every future ConFab, but time is limited. Stay tuned for the program direction for 2017.
David Mount, marketing and business development manager, The ConFab
