Events and conferences in our industry have been decidedly glum the past couple of years. With high-tech in the dumps and business travel severely cut back since September 11, not to mention plain old corporate spending freezes, some commentators dared to talk of trade shows being a thing of the past. On the contrary, it looks like trade shows are making a comeback in 2004. The total number of attendees and exhibitors at the co-located APEX/IPC Printed Circuits Expo held Feb. 24 to 26 in Anaheim, CA was over 10,000, about 1000 more than last year's two shows combined, according to Joe Dudeck, communications manager at IPC.
Likewise, attendance was superb at the Optical Fiber Conference (OFC) in Los Angeles Feb. 22 to 27, considering the telecom bubble popped long ago. The buzz at the show was about recovery and how broadband will drive the telecom turnaround. Oz Optics firmly placed the bottom of the telecom trench behind us, distributing t-shirts that said, "I survived the telecom meltdown."
Says Colleen Morrison, director of media relations and government affairs for the Optical Society of America, managing co-sponsor of OFC: "OFC 2004 was a huge success! We are thrilled to report that we had a 4% increase in attendance this year to 15,689 (up from 15,023 last year). Additionally, we had a strong international exhibit presence, with approximately 40% of our nearly 650 exhibitors coming from outside the United States. Throughout the conference, the theme was 'cautious optimism' for an upswing in the [fiberoptic] industry."
Overall, both shows seemed to have fewer "booth jockeys" in the exhibit hall. Attendees could meet real employees who could actually talk about real products and real technology. All this bodes well for the connector industry, which sees positive results on the heels of the PCB, electronics manufacturing, and telecom markets, among others.
Our first article this month is on harsh-environment fiberoptic connectors. Dennis Horwitz, business director of Tempo Connection Systems (Camarillo, CA), addresses the "harsh reality" faced by fiberoptic links and communications systems in defense and aerospace applications.
We then go to Teradyne Connection Systems (Nashua, NH) with an article on reducing total system cost in the design phase. Rich Humphreys, product manager, describes how to achieve profitable performance by reducing PCB layers.
In the manufacturing phase, a new plastics-processing technology from Trexel (Woburn, MA) reduces cost through efficient manufacturing of electronic connectors, sockets, and lead-frame components. Lee Hyde and Levi Kishbaugh describe how the MuCell process benefits the quality and cost of electronic connection systems in computer, communications, and automotive applications.
Next on my shows and events itinerary is electronicaUSA and the Embedded Systems Conference in San Francisco, March 29 to April 1, of which Connector Specifier is a media sponsor. This is the first year for electronicaUSA, which hopes to capitalize on the popularity of the biannual electronicaMunich show. Already being touted as the largest systems design event in North America, it's also the "must-attend" event for the electronics community. Hope to see you there.
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Valerie Coffey, Editor-in-Chief
valeriec@pennwell.com
