Just after posting our IEDM slideshow sneak-peek , a reader emailed us to point out something he thinks can help this year's IEDM attendees -- and anyone who regularly goes to industry conferences/trade shows. You know the drill: obtain the event schedule and program/abstracts in advance, mark the talks you want to see -- then identify all the conflicts, mourn the tough decisions, lament the papers you'll have to miss, brace for room-room and hall-hall sprints, etc. It's pure "drudgery," Aneesh Nainani tells SST : "Going back and forth between the conference leaflet and the abstract booklet, and then discovering that their [sic] exists an conflict between the papers I wanted to attend and finally loosing [sic] the piece of paper with my schedule on the first day of the conference." Next week's IEDM in Washington DC is a prime example of such conference chaos: three days, 36 sessions, over 200 presentations.

Fear not, intrepid travelers: Aneesh has devised a free app for iPhones/iPads/iTouch that purposefully targets next week's IEDM: browse the conference schedule, flag papers you want to attend, show where all the session are at a particular time slot, browse papers by category, find the room for the next paper presentation, etc. You can also search across extended abstracts to narrow down to a specific topic (e.g. flash memory) or presenter (e.g. Stanford U.) The app is downloadable for free at the App Store here .


Aneesh is a Stanford PhD grad (2010), during which time he pursued summer research stints at Leti, IBM, SEMATECH, and AMAT. He's currently a senior device engineer at AMAT. He's also a presenter at this year's IEDM, describing a high-k pMOSFET made with 3% GeSn (Paper #16.6: "GeSn Technology: Extending the Ge Electronics Roadmap" ). -- J.M.