Something for Everyone at SEMICON West

Six years ago, SEMICON West was an exposition with a few keynote speeches. There were some SEMI International Standards meetings, a president’s reception and many non-affiliated, off-site meetings by vendors, magazines and other organizations, but few technical or business programs designed to attract specific constituencies.

Today, there’s about 200 hours of business and technical programs formally held in conjunction with SEMICON West. These include free, on-floor TechXPOT sessions, paid technical conferences, and several programs by partnership organizations that SEMI actively supports and promotes. Some of these new programs address exhibitor demands for more on-floor show traffic, or more technical buyer attendees, but the overarching motivation is to serve specific industry segments with meaningful and practical environments in which to collaborate. Some of these collaborations are focused on selling, some are for learning, and some are to facilitate agreements between industry players.

As show organizers, our goal is first to identify specific constituencies that share common information needs, interests or issues. This isn’t as simple or straightforward as it sounds. Companies, titles, subjects and issues overlap. Perspectives on subjects like 22nm and 3DIC include materials and equipment suppliers, buyers and process developers, engineering specifiers and purchasing/supply chain managers. The deeper and more in-depth you get on a topic the narrower the audience; the broader the coverage of a topic, the less technical. At West, our goal is not to compete with narrow technical conferences, but bring key buyer/seller/specifier communities together in a practical way.

How we do this can be seen is in the programs and how they align to important market segments. Here’s the plan so far:

Advanced wafer processing
http://www.semiconwest.org/Segments/Semiconductor/index.htm

Packaging
http://www.semiconwest.org/Segments/Packaging/index.htm

Test
http://www.semiconwest.org/Segments/Test/index.htm

3DIC
http://www.semiconwest.org/Segments/3DIC/index.htm

MEMS
http://www.semiconwest.org/Segments/MEMS/index.htm

LED
http://www.semiconwest.org/Segments/LEDs/index.htm

Printed/Flexible Electronics
http://www.semiconwest.org/Segments/PFE/index.htm

Have we missed anything? What would you recommend? I'd love to hear your ideas.