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ELECTRONIC DEVICE FAILURE ANALYSIS | VOLUME 18 NO. 3
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ISTFA 2016
ISTFA 2016 PREVIEW
Martin Keim, ISTFA 2016 General Chair
Mentor Graphics Corporation
Selecting the theme of the symposium is one of the
great privileges of the General Chair. The theme
binds together the individual aspects of the sym-
posium, focuses the activities, and sets the overall tone
for the entireweek. Selecting the theme is also something
that can cause sleepless nights for the General Chair…
ACTING ON “THE NEXT-GENERATION”
THEME
“The Next Generation” is the theme I chose for the
42nd International Symposium for Testing and Failure
Analysis (ISTFA). It places up-front-and-center the “crisis”
we are facing. After I announced the theme at the EDFAS
General Meeting during ISTFA 2015, fellow engineers
came to me to passionately express their concern that
not enough newengineers are entering the field of failure
analysis, and those who are need lots of extra training.
Themost recent symposia began instituting programs
to counter this trend. For 2016, we are intensifying our
efforts to attract new engineers as well as offer oppor-
tunities for students to present their work and engage in
discussions with experts in the field. These interactions
benefit both sides tremendously. A student’smindmay be
placed on a path toward researching something extraor-
dinary, and you, the expert, may have met your future
new hire. The ISTFA Organizing Committee plans to offer
special prizes as a way of acknowledging contributions
from students.
Inpreparation for ISTFA’s Panel Discussionandkeynote
speaker, we dug deeper into what is “out there”—some-
thing that shows the failure analysis community working
solutions to the next-generation problem. We were suc-
cessful in finding several such examples. In his keynote
address, Prof. Dr.-Ing. Christian Boit from the Technische
Universität Berlin, former director of failure analysis at
Infineon Technology and General Chair of ISTFA 2002, will
make the case that it is possible for a university to equip
engineers with great skills and knowledge, ready to enter
theworkforce in the demanding failure analysisworld. His
students successfully find internships and employment at
tier-1 semiconductor companies not only in Europe but
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