Guest editorial

Citation

Skwarek, A. (2018), "Guest editorial", Circuit World, Vol. 44 No. 1, pp. 1-1. https://doi.org/10.1108/CW-02-2018-067

The International Microelectronics and Packaging Society (IMAPS) Poland Chapter was established in September 1982. In the beginning, it was the ISHM-Poland Chapter, and from the 1997, it became the IMAPS-Poland Chapter.

The IMAPS is a non-profit making organization whose aim is to spread of knowledge relating to hybrid microelectronics; a key technology in the assembly and application of semiconductors, thin film circuits and printed circuit boards (PCBs) to form practical miniaturized electronic equipment. In 2008, the IMAPS joined with the IEEE Components, Packaging and Manufacturing Technology (CPMT) Society, bringing into formation the IMAPS-CPMT organization.

The 21st European Microelectronics and Packaging Conference, EMPC 2017 was organized together with its satellite conference – 41st IMAPS Poland International Conference under common message “Where West meets East”.

This joint event took place between September 10 and 13, 2017 and it was organized by the members of the IMAPS Poland Chapter.

The scope of the conference covered everything in electronics from the chip to the system. The conference was attended by 226 participants, including 165 guests from abroad. During the conference, five keynote lectures, 87 invited lectures and 57 posters were presented. The conference was supported by five international journals indexed in Journal Citation Report or Web of Science databases.

This year, as in the previous year, two young scientists have been awarded the refund of the conference fee during the next IMAPS 2018 Poland Conference.

In the special issue of Circuit World, six papers have been collected, covering the processes and procedures associated with PCB technology. All of them were subjected to the journal’s regular reviewing procedure.

In the first paper, Felba reviewed the different technological aspects of silver particles sintering for electronic packaging. In the second paper, Drabczyk et al. investigated the thermal interface materials based on graphene and silver nanopowder.

The third paper by Tomaszewski et al. shows the different aspects of packing density of inkjet-printed paths.

Stęplewski et al. analyzed the thermal stability analysis of passive components embedded into printed circuit boards.

Veselý et al. reported the different solder joint quality based on heating factor calculations.

In the last paper, Firek et al. described the fabrication of ISFET structures with chemically modified membrane for bovine serum albumin detection.

I would like to thank all the authors and the reviewers for their scientific work and contributions that have led to the development and publication of this special issue of Circuit World. I hope that it will be of interest to readers of the journal and that it will help them to find novel solutions, contribute to the creation of new ideas and initiate many varied discussions about PCBs and related interconnect technologies. I believe that this branch of science could be effectively developed in the future.