Annual developer conference enters second decade

22nd August 2017

Alice Matthews

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Semiconductor test equipment supplier, Advantest, held its VOICE 2017 Developer Conference in May. The 2017 event marked the conference entering its second decade with 113 technical breakout sessions, two Partners’ Expos, 29 technology kiosks and multiple networking opportunities for members of the semiconductor test industry. This year’s 11^th edition featured dual sessions on 16th to 17th May in Palm Springs, California, and on 26th May in Shanghai, China, where the event had been held once before.

Altogether, more than 450 people attended the events, over half of whom represented Advantest customers and partners.

At the US event, there were 88 technical presentations while the China conference had 25 papers. Forty-five percent of the papers in Palm Springs and 60% in Shanghai were either written or co-authored by customers. In total, VOICE 2017 featured technical papers from 22 companies representing 12 countries. The papers were reviewed by a technical committee that included 41 Advantest customers from 19 companies.

VOICE is made possible by the organisational work of a Steering Committee, made up of volunteer representatives from Advantest and its customers, and the support of event sponsors, which reached a new high of 25 companies this year including ten new sponsors. Industry organisations including SEMI, the Global Semiconductor Alliance (GSA), VLSIresearch, IC Insights and IHS also returned to support VOICE in 2017.

Best Paper Awards
At each VOICE conference, attendees vote to select the best technical presentations. This year, VOICE went paperless with all voting and feedback done with the mobile app. At the US event, Edwin Lowery, Shiyang Deng and Aether Lee, all from Advantest, won for their paper on 'Instrument Synchronisation in SmarTest 8: RF to MX to DC to Digital'. In China, Zhaoyang Wang of NXP and co-authors Lydia Jiang, Kai Kang, Qiannan Ren and Peng Wang from Advantest were recognised for their presentation on 'Testing Automotive Airbag System Devices on the V93000'.