IMS2009 Technical Program March Update
By Mark Gouker and Larry Kushner, TPC Co-Chairs

Registration is open, and it is time to make plans for attending the symposium. This year we are introducing a number of changes to make your time at the symposium more productive, less hectic and more enjoyable. The RFIC and ARFTG only attendees will also find more activities and technical content of interest. We hope you will stay an extra day or the entire week!

One of the biggest dilemmas in attending the International Microwave Symposium is finding time to attend a large portion of the technical sessions, spend time at the industrial exhibit to learn about new products, discuss your needs with vendors, and to interact with colleagues from around the World. We have done two things to address this issue during the 2009 IMS in Boston. The first is an adjustment to the Microwave Week schedule. The second is to organize the technical program into focus tracks so it is easier to find the technical content of interest to you. We will begin by describing the changes to the Microwave Week schedule.

Adjustments to the schedule have been made both for the arrangement of the events during the week and the daily schedule. First we will describe the arrangement of the events during the week.

• We will begin with the workshops. We are going back to the approach of predominately RFIC workshops on Sunday and IMS workshops on Monday and Friday. In addition, we have added a number of Wednesday workshops that should be of interest to RFIC and ARFTG attendees as well as IMS attendees.
• The plenary session will be held Monday evening prior to the traditional Monday evening reception. The RFIC Conference has successfully done this for the past few years. Most attendees are already at the symposium attending workshops, the RFIC conference or just arriving during the day Monday. Holding the plenary session just before the reception is an excellent combination, and it allows more time for technical papers Tuesday morning.
• Next, we are reducing the number of papers with similar technical content being presented at the same time. With the focus track arrangement of papers, we can spread the technical content more uniformly throughout the week.
• The Wednesday Industry hosted reception will be held on the exhibit floor. In addition to usual opportunity to interact with colleague, this venue provides another opportunity to visit the exhibits as well as socialize with vendor colleagues.
• Finally, there is a new Thursday evening social to provide a final opportunity to socialize with colleagues before the symposium concludes on Friday.

Now we will describe the adjustments to the daily schedule.

• The overlap between the oral paper and the interactive forum paper presentations has been removed. The oral sessions have been shorted to permit an hour break between the two oral sessions in the morning and the two oral sessions in the afternoon.
• The interactive forum papers will be located near the oral sessions so that it is easier to attend. Also, the interactive forum papers will be left up all day with the authors present during both the morning and the afternoon breaks. So, if you want to visit the industrial exhibit during one of the breaks, there is still an opportunity to discuss the interactive forum papers with the authors during the other break
• Lastly, there will be breaks placed in the focus track schedules where no oral papers are presented. This will provide an opportunity to visit the industrial exhibit.

The second major change at this year’s symposium is to arrange the technical sessions in to focus tracks to make it easier to find papers of interest to you. The focus tracks are Microwave Modeling, Active Components, Passive Components and Microwave Systems. Microwave Modeling track focuses on advanced analytic and simulation techniques to predict the performance of microwave components and circuits. The Active and Passive Components tracks covers all aspects of the state-of-the-art performance and techniques of microwave component development. Finally, the Microwave System track covers technology developments that are more central to system development and highlights performance of emerging systems. The specific topics covered in the focus tracks are shown in the figure below.

We will use the colors associated with the Focus Tracks throughout the Symposium to make is easy to identify sessions of interest to you.

In next month’s news letter, we will give the inside scoop on how to make a successful presentation.

[Back to the IMS 2009 web site]