The pandemic made this a unique year for ECTC. To my knowledge, it is the first time that the in-person conference had to be canceled, and I am certain it is the first time the conference was held as a virtual event. While it was a disappointment to cancel the in-person event, we saw great participation in the online event. The global packaging community showed up!
The support from our sponsoring organizations, IEEE, and EPS, along with the generosity of our corporate sponsors, allowed us to provide free attendance for the virtual conference. The numbers below reveal how the online, free-to-attend ECTC reached a much larger and more diverse audience.
- Over 7,704 people registered to attend the free virtual ECTC. In comparison, the record attendance for an in-person ECTC is 1,738, which was in 2018.
- The attendees were from 55 different countries around the world. In comparison, at the 2019 in-person conference, we had attendees from 25 different countries.
- The on-demand conference had 45 technical sessions with 346 presentations and 7 special sessions with 60 invited presentations.
- During the conference, attendees watched over 28,000 hours of content.
- Nearly 2,000 people watched the excellent keynote presentation from Dr. Douglas Yu of TSMC.
The 45 technical sessions averaged just over 450 attendees. Table 1 shows the top ten most-attended technical sessions. Table 2 shows the top ten most attended special sessions.
Thank you again to our corporate sponsors! Due to your generous support, we were able to provide this year’s conference to our entire community for free! I would like to thank all authors, presenters, invited speakers, program committee members, sponsors, volunteers, and all attendees who contributed to the success of the 70th ECTC. Special thanks to the keynote speaker, Dr. Douglas Yu from TSMC, who is mentioned above. Dr. Yu gave a very impactful lecture on the subject of heterogeneous integration and the future direction of innovation in the semiconductor industry. We received a great deal of positive feedback regarding the quality of the keynote lecture. Thank you, Dr. Yu!
I would like to thank Rich Jannuzzi, Brett Houseal, David Stankiewicz, Denise Manning, and the other IEEE staff members who helped us quickly convert to the virtual conference. I would like to thank our Program Chair, Rozalia Beica, for her expertise in establishing very timely and important invited sessions. Thanks to our Assistant Program Chair, Ibrahim Guven, for his tireless efforts in managing our technical sessions, and to the other members of the Executive Committee for their dedication to making ECTC a premier conference. I would also like to thank Dr. C. P. Wong for his help in securing our keynote lecturer, and I would also like to acknowledge his 33-year volunteer service to ECTC.
Planning for the 71st ECTC is already underway. The in-person event is planned for June 1-4, 2021 and will be held at the Sheraton San Diego Hotel & Marina in San Diego, California. Abstracts are due Oct. 4, 2020. We look forward to your support to help make the 71stECTC in 2021 a huge success.
Hopefully, the pandemic will be history soon, and we will get to meet in-person in San Diego. That said, we are already preparing hybrid/virtual contingencies for scenarios where the pandemic is still limiting travel and in-person meetings.
