At press time, the sessions for The ConFab 2013 (www.theconfab.com) are being finalized. The overall theme of the conference is "Filling the fabs of the future," with a focus on the types of products that will drive demand for semiconductors in the next decade, the technologies and processes that will be required to meet this demand, and the manufacturing and operational challenges that will arise as a result of this demand and how to meet them.

We'll kick things off on Tuesday morning with a keynote talk by Y.W. Lee, vice chairman of Samsung. Session 1 will focus on major economic trends, with talks from Jim Feldhan of Semico, Bill McClean of IC Insights, Mark Thirsk of Linx Consulting and Dan Hutcheson of VLSI Research.

Next, we'll look at the design/manufacturing/packaging/testing supply chain, including collaboration between fabless/product design companies and foundries. Mike Campbell of Qualcomm and Jae Cho of Xilinx will present in this session.

In the afternoon on Monday, we'll hear from a panel of experts on 3D integration, including Mike Ma of SiliconWare, Subu Iyer of IBM (who will also be keynoting on Tuesday morning), HoMing Tong of ASE, and Bob Patti of Terazzon. A special thanks to Phil Garrou and IEEE CPMT, the technical sponsor of this session and another session on Advanced Packaging.

Tuesday will begin with a keynote from Subu Iyer, followed by a panel session moderated by Scott Jones of Alix Partners. The session will focus on R&D Portfolio Management and Improving R&D Efficiency. Jones will share the results of a AlixPartners' study of the 72 largest semiconductor companies globally over the past six years that found that companies with a higher degree of R&D efficiency show greater profitability.

We'll then get into a status report on advanced packaging, with an excellent line-up of speakers, including: Devan Iyer from Texas Instruments, Bob Lanzone from Amkor, Steve Anderson from STATS ChipPAC, and Ted Tessier from FlipChip International.

In the afternoon on Tuesday, we'll hear from Sanjay Rajguru of ISMI and a panel of speakers assembled by ISMI, focusing on accelerating manufacturing productivity. I hope you can join us!

Solid State Technology | Volume 56 | Issue 2 | February | 2013