SEMICON Japan 2015: World of IOT

Dear Tanaka Lab’s student blog reader, this is Salman, a B4 student.

TOKYO (12/16), The SEMICON Japan 2015 was held in Tokyo Big Sight on 16-18 December 2015. From Tanaka Lab, besides having our own booth which is managed by staffs, five students – Kaneko-san (M2), Suzuki-san (M1), Sato-san (M1), Zhu-san (M1), and me – also attended this event for one day.

We arrived at the venue around 10 minutes before its opening, and there were already so many people waiting and doing registration on the reception site. We have already registered beforehand, so we can directly enter the site at the opening.

It was my first experience in attending such industrial fair. It really amazed me, how they can gather many high-level industries, and even research laboratories from university. Those industries and laboratories provided demonstration of their technology, to attract each other for collaboration. Besides that, there was also a job hunting corner for those who are interested. I was quite surprised that some social sciences students also attended the job hunting corner in such science-atmospheric event. This has broadened my mind that we need to collaborate with each other to achieve higher achievement.

Some industries we saw were not unfamiliar for us. DISCO, ULVAC, and Swagelok are of the industries that are familiar to us, since we are dealing with their products also in Tanaka Lab. However, there are also many industries which are unfamiliar for us, and it was interesting to see their technologies, which we have never seen before. One of them was Minimal Fab, which impressed us with their clean room-replacement technology, within many fancy-looks small machines. Moreover, to attract people, Fujikin also arranged a race in making an assembly, the fastest five during the event will receive some prize, which made the event become livelier.

In this event, not only semiconductor technology was presented. Many real things were also presented. For instance, Tesla Motors exhibited their latest electric car which has a very fancy design and offers highly efficient space usage. However, I am still wondering if such electric car is really better than the gasoline-based car which is widely used up to now. Including the car automation which is becoming an interesting topic, is it really that good? We really have to think carefully of the technology before developing it.

We also passed by Tanaka Lab’s booth in the “World of IOT” corner, which was managed by Takoshima-san, and MEMS Park Consortium’s booth in “Tohoku Pavilion” corner, which was managed by Totsu-sensei. Tanaka Lab's booth was placed next to MEMS Park Consortium's booth which was managed by Fukushima Prefectural Koriyama-kita Technical High School that demonstrated their robot which is one of the winner on iCAN 2014.

Thanks to Sato-san for providing the photos. And finally, we would like to thank our sponsor, SEMICON Mirai-College, who has provided us return travel expenses from Sendai to Tokyo.