Key Semiconductor Conferences go Virtual

This last week the 2020 Symposia on VLSI Technology and Circuits (VLSI Conference) was held as a virtual conference for the first time and it was announced today (June 24^th) that this year’s IEDM conference will also be held as a virtual conference.

“The IEDM Executive Committee has decided that in the interest of prioritizing the health and safety of the scientific community, a virtual approach is the best option for this year,” said Dina Triyoso, IEDM 2020 Publicity Chair and Technologist at TEL Technology Center, America, LLC.

I attended the virtual VLSI Conference last week and I thought it would be interesting to discuss my experience with the conference and what it means for IEDM.

The first and perhaps most obvious aspect of a virtual conference is you do not have to travel to attend it saving travel expenses and time away from the office. Of course, the question then becomes what is the experience like?

In general, I really liked the experience, in fact I would say that in many ways I prefer the virtual conference.

The advantages of a virtual conference:

• No travel, saving time and money.
• At large conferences there are often parallel tracks with multiple papers being presented at the same time. It is not uncommon to have two or even more papers I would like to see presented at the same time. Conversely there will sometimes be gaps where there are no papers of interest being presented. For the virtual conference, the papers were live streamed and recorded. I exclusively accessed the conference through the recordings and really likes that I could pick when I wanted to watch different presentations and never had to choose one over the other because of scheduling conflicts.
• When you are at a conference watching a paper presented, you are often sitting in a tightly packed auditorium trying to take notes on a computer in your lap and the presenter is trying to fit in as much information as possible in their time slot. It can be difficult to capture all the information. Sitting at my computer watching a video that I can pause, and rewind is a much better experience.
• At some conferences, such as the SPIE Advanced Lithography Conference there are essentially no proceedings, at other conferences such as VLSI and IEDM the papers are published in a proceeding, but the presentations are typically not made available. The presentations often have a lot more figures than the paper and are a valuable source of additional information. At the virtual VLSI Conference as you watched each presentation you had the option of downloading the paper and the presentation.

There are some disadvantages to a virtual conference and there were some execution issues with the VLSI Conference:

• One important part of technical conferences is the opportunity to have private conversations with colleagues and to network, that is missing from a virtual conference.
• I heard there were some streaming issues with the conference and one of the recorded presentations I watched had the sound fading out periodically throughout the presentation. These are the kind of technical issues I would expect would get worked out with more experience with virtual conferences.
• You had to sign in to each session and then if you want to switch to a new session sign in again, it would have been easier if you could just sign in and then navigate between sessions but this was a minor inconvenience.
• My biggest issues with the virtual conference was the over one hundred reminders emails I was sent. It seems that each session sent a reminder in advance and if you didn’t watch the live stream you got a sorry you missed it email as well. I complained about this to the committee and was told it was a feature of the software that couldn’t be turned off (and there is no opt out link on the emails either). This needs to be fixed.

Overall, I thought it was a good experience. I even suggested to the conference that since everything is recorded, they could leave registration open for a few months and people could sign up and watch the conference and download the papers, this could potentially be a way to expand the revenue stream for the conference.

I will miss networking at IEDM this year, it is an important conference for me in that respect, but I am looking forward to a better experience accessing the technical conference through a virtual conference.

IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) is the world’s preeminent forum for reporting technological breakthroughs in the areas of semiconductor and electronic device technology, design, manufacturing, physics, and modeling. IEDM is the flagship conference for nanometer-scale CMOS transistor technology, advanced memory, displays, sensors, MEMS devices, novel quantum and nano-scale devices and phenomenology, optoelectronics, devices for power and energy harvesting, high-speed devices, as well as process technology and device modeling and simulation.

Also Read:

Effect of Design on Transistor Density

Cost Analysis of the Proposed TSMC US Fab

Can TSMC Maintain Their Process Technology Lead