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SEMI-THERM Conference to Be Held Virtually March 22–26

March 21, 2021 by Shannon Cuthrell

The 37th annual SEMI-THERM conference and exhibition will take place virtually March 22–26. Here’s a preview of the event.

International engineers, professionals and experts from both industry and academia will convene virtually from March 22–26 to discuss the latest trends and advancements in thermal management for electronic components and systems. 

SEMI-THERM 2021

SEMI-THERM 2021 will be filled with short courses, technical sessions, workshops and panels covering design, modeling and testing techniques in areas such as heat sink design, electronics cooling, computational fluid dynamics, and more. 

This year’s SEMI-THERM will mark the 37th annual iteration of the event, which first debuted in December 1984 in Arizona. Each year, the program usually brings a turnout of around 400 engineers, executives, consultants, sales and marketing professionals and academic experts. The 2020 event, originally scheduled last March in San Jose, California, was canceled over coronavirus concerns. 

About 20 exhibitors are included in the 2021 lineup, including Boyd Corporation, InfraTech, Siemens, ARBROWN, Future Facilities, Cradle CFD, Indium Corporation, Element Six, Thermexit, Novark Technologies, JETCOOL Technologies, CPC, Cadence, Blueshift Materials, Celsia and KLINGER U.K. Vendor exhibits will take place throughout the event, and in a series of 30-minute workshops, company representatives will share the technical inner-workings of their products. 

Another series of technical sessions will feature more than 20 presentations focused on design, testing and R&D efforts and thermal challenges and solutions. 

Lieven Vervecken, co-founder and CEO of Belgium-based generative thermal design firm Diabatix, will present a keynote talk on the latest innovations in computational fluid dynamics. 

A panel session will feature academic and R&D experts from both private and public sectors discussing liquid cooling trends for use in data centers, ground vehicles and aerospace applications. Panelists hail from the National Science Foundation’s Center for Energy Smart Electronic Systems, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the Equinix Data Center, Collins Aerospace and the Southwest Research Institute. 

Two-hour short courses will focus on multidisciplinary co-design models for teams, heat sink design and optimization, how to design a two-phase cold plate cooled system and an introduction to electronics cooling techniques. A separate embedded tutorial presentation will show participants how to implement a biothermal model for human skin contact with wearable electronic devices. 

There will also be two awards presented to notable contributors in the thermal field: The Thermi Award will honor Ross Wilcoxon, an associate director of Collins Aerospace’s mission systems and advanced technology arm in Iowa, and the Hall of Fame Lifetime Achievement Award will go to Dereje Agonafer, a presidential distinguished professor in mechanical aerospace engineering at the University of Texas at Arlington and director of the NSF’s Energy Efficient Systems Industry/University Cooperative Research Center and the Electronics, MEMS and Nanoelectronics Systems Packaging Center. 

Registration costs $575 for professionals and $350 for students.