SI's Take on Semicon West

SEMICON West, one of our busiest shows of the year, just keeps getting busier. We used to have five days to cover everything — Monday through Wednesday up in San Francisco covering the front end, heading down to San Jose Wednesday night to finish out the week in the back end. And those were the days before Semiconductor International took over the show daily, and before SEMI started up its TechXPOT programs. Now we have just three days to get and write all the news we can for the show’s printed Daily News, our own ongoing online news and daily NewsBreak newsletters — not to mention the usual bit of face time with the sources that help us out so much throughout the year.

(I know. You’ve taken out your violins, haven’t you? I don’t mean to sound like I’m whining. In fact, SEMICON West has gotten to be one of the most exciting times of the year, taking me back to the thrilling days of newspaper reporting.)

Enter Intersolar North America.

SEMI has tried various tactics to get visitors over to Moscone West since it opened about five years ago (my gosh, has it been that long?), including beer halls and Segway tryouts. No offense intended to the packaging suppliers who’ve been stuck over there, but the place has stayed pretty dead. Last year, SEMI put a few photovoltaics-related keynotes in the West Hall, and the place got packed. So teaming up with a solar show to help bring the crowds that way seems like a decent idea.

I’ll certainly be spending more of my time this year over in the West Hall than I have in years past — meeting with exhibitors at Intersolar, as well as some photovoltaics-related SEMICON West exhibitors (and a few packaging folks as well) — but I’m still limiting most of my time there to a single morning (after all, there are still only three days, and we still have other news to write). I plan to check out a couple Intersolar conference presentations, including a Global CSP Market Forecast on Monday afternoon and a Market Technology Outlook session on Wednesday afternoon as well. All conference programs, by the way, are at the new InterContinental hotel, adjacent to Moscone West on Howard Street.

But there is a lot at Intersolar that I won’t be spending my time on. In putting together our roundup of the Intersolar show for Tuesday’s SEMICON West Daily News, it struck me, actually, how much of the show is not really up our alley. There are the full conference tracks on solar thermal technology, for example, and exhibits for companies that are further down the manufacturing line than we generally cover — the installation aspects that are more akin to the board assembly that we also don’t cover in the semiconductor industry.

At Semiconductor International, we’ve been covering our particular niche within the photovoltaics industry for several years — primarily through our LexisNexis feed, with occasional staff-written news. In fact, you can check out all the latest coverage at any time on our Photovoltaics Channel. Our July issue, which you can pick up in our booth (Booth 1513, South Hall) at SEMICON West, features photovoltaics even more prominently, including a cover story on thin-film PV; an article from Synopsys on applying TCAD to solar cells; Coherent’s explanation on the use of lasers to support the solar roadmap; an Expert Perspective from Rhone Resch, president of the Solar Energy Industries Association; and a web-exclusive feature from EV Group about cross-industry innovation between MEMS and PV.

It will be interesting, actually, to see how well Intersolar North America fits into the SEMICON West scene. There are some concerns from SEMI members, from what I hear, but perhaps the jury’s still out. Let me know what you think of the whole plan, and if you find yourself over there during this year’s show, report back to us here to let us know how it went.