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Going to IEDM
September 5, 2007
My first technical conference was in 1985. I was hired by E.E. Times, partly because I was living in Japan and the newspaper wanted a reporter there to cover trade friction, Japan’s chip industry, and so on. I told them when they hired me that I wasn’t an engineer, and the editor-in-chief at the time, Girish Mhatre, seemed cool with that.
But I quickly got scared that I was in over my head when we went to Kobe for the 1985 Symposium on VLSI Technology in June. Girish and a large and lovely man named Stan Baker came across the pond and we all went from Tokyo to Kobe on the bullet train.
There, we three tried to gain entry to the VLSI symposium as press guys. Nothing doing -- only one journalist per publication. Stan covered it that year, while I snuck in for a few hours. I listened to a few technology presentations and realized that I had no idea what was going on. Covering DRAM price wars was one thing. Covering S-D junction engineering was something else.
I was ashen, shaken to the core. I remember thinking that my baby boys, not to mention the readers, depended on me to know something about process technology.
(Stan had other worries. He went around department stores, looking for small Japanese goldfish, kingyo, that he could bring back to California for his collection. Sadly, the pricey fish all died on the airplane because they didn’t go through the pre-flight oxygen conditioning program recommended by the kingyo dealer.)
The years went by, and I kind of hid out in Japan, learning little by little. I got a few books, and had a lot of interviews with Japanese engineers. I went to more VLSI symposia. I liked the whole idea that things could be made so small and so precisely. I loved learning new words, hated that the more I learned the more complicated the technology got.
When the ‘90s arrived, I started covering IEDM. The 1997 conference in Washington, D.C. was awesome, with Dan Edelstein (IBM) and Suresh Venkatesan (Motorola) each talking about copper interconnects.
Fast forward to now. I am happily looking forward to Dec. 10 when IEDM kicks off in Washington, preceded by the Sunday short courses.
Back in 1985, I was shaking from fear. Now, I’m in a state of anticipation.
Posted by David Lammers on September 5, 2007 | Comments (0)
