Day 2 started with several presentations on Avalanche Photodiodes and SPADs. Like other technologies and other applications, also the SPADs have come a long way in technology and in complexity. It seems that the “killer application” for the SPADs is lying in the medical world. But nevertheless others are mentioned as well, even the usage of a SPAD in a joystick and as a random number generator.
After the SPAD session, the machine gun was loaded and fired again : 26 flash presentations of 3 minutes, being the appetizer to make the audience curious for the posters. It is amazing to see how over the years the audience and the presenters got used to the flash presentations. Almost nobody went over the time limit.
Later on the day the poster viewing session offered the opportunity to a closer interaction with the presentors. Many people attended the poster viewing, actually not surprising, because having 46 posters out offers enough information to make sure that one always can find some subject of interest. Also for the poster session it is way too difficult to describe the technical content. The subjects ranged from very detailed device physics (pinning voltage, saturation levels, feed-forward voltages, …), over image sensor architectures (TDI clocking in CMOS, gratings in a stacked imager, …), to circuitry (several ADC architectures, …) to subjects on system level (specs for security cameras, …). All posters were hanging on the poster boards, except one. For the first time we had a walking poster : the author prepared his poster on two boards, one hanging on his chest, one hanging on his back, like a walking advertising man. Instead of having the audience to choose the poster they would like to see, the walking poster man went to the people he thought that might be interested in his poster. Or maybe he went to the people of which he thought they had to see his poster ! Good marketing, good idea, thanks Bart.
Albert, 15 June 2013.