IEDM 2012: There's a new app for that

A year ago an SST reader, fed up with all-to-familiar conference chaos, told us about an App he'd built specifically to navigate through the International Electron Device Meeting (IEDM), browsing and reading papers and scheduling and mapping to one's heart's content.

This year, the folks at IEDM took up the challenge themselves. Designated the "Official Application for [the] 2012 International Electron Device Meeting," this app lets users view the entire schedule of IEDM papers and sessions, and plan attendance and meetings accordingly. You can mark the sessions and papers you wish to attend, download and read any paper, keep track of daily plans, etc. Search capabilities include paper type (student, late, invited), with updated schedule data. Note that full papers are available only to registered IEDM 2012 attendees; full papers will be downloadable from IEEE Xplore about two weeks after IEDM, but only IEEE members can access them.

Base requirements are iPhone 3GS or newer, iPod touch 3rd-gen or newer, and iPad with iOS 4.0 or later; it also works with Android 2.2 and up. You can download the IEDM 2012 app at iTunes or at Google Play. (If your device isn't compatible with the IEDM 2012 app, you can still use the digital scheduler on a Web-only version, accessible here.)

Another Japan quake: Crisis averted, but impact nonetheless

Nearly two years ago a catastrophe in Japan that literally changed the physical landscape, impacted millions of lives, and rewrote strategies and rules from energy production to supply chains.

Fast-forward to today: a 7.3-magnitude earthquake struck Japan, offshore near Sendai right near where the 2011 disaster began (and possibly even an aftershock), but apparently causing no major damage or serious injuries. It does, though, bring back vivid and painful memories and ever-present worries about infrastructure -- and, specific to this industry, the stability of semiconductor manufacturing operations.

It doesn't take a megaquake such as the 8.9-magnitude Tohoku one to seriously damage a local semiconductor ecosystem. A 7.6-magnitude quake in 1999, for example, shut down semiconductor fabs in Taiwan, and Silicon Valley seized up in 1989's Loma Prieta quake (6.9), points out Jim Handy, analyst with Objective Analysis. Japan, which is intimately familiar with earthquakes and their repercussions, has seen its own semi industry setbacks from far less powerful quakes in the past few years: 5.9-magnitude in Sept. 2008, 6.0 and 6.8 in July 2007, and 6.9 in March 2007. As a result, Japan's infrastructure is better-equipped than most regions to handle them.

That said, it doesn't take much to knock a plant offline as a precaution to minimize and assess damage to facilities and equipment (and workers), and that impacts work-in-progress. Japan is a major source of chips used in consumer electronics devices, particularly memory; it's home to a third of NAND flash production and about 15% of DRAM, with Elpida in particular a significant supplier of mobile SDRAMs in smartphones and PCs, Handy notes. Luckily most of the production and inventory for the year-end holiday push has already occurred, which should minimize much of that supply-chain impact, so "significant shortages are unlikely," though demand for the Lunar New Year might be affected, he says.

But it doesn't take much of a production decrease -- or even fears of one -- to have a dramatic impact on pricing trends, either. Expect "short-term price swings as a result of this earthquake," Handy predicts.