Current Issue

It is done; the autumn 2009 issue has been finished!
You might have been wondering about the discontinuity of the dates of publication of mstnews in the second half of 2009.
Due to organizational and financial reasons, we had to wait until we had gathered a critical mass of topics, articles and paid reports and News Pages. In particular, this was depending on the 3rd Microsystems Congress of the VDE Association and the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) in Berlin in the middle of October.

Now we provide a “bundled issue” that is exceptionally bigger than usual and includes the three topics
 

• MST R&D Funding in Germany -  Status and Strategies for 2010+
• New Optical Technologies for Smart Systems
• System Integration

and a lot of News Pages from third parties. The first topic was prepared by VDI/VDE-IT on behalf of the German Ministry for Education and Research. Furthermore we have catched up on the Micro-optics topic, which was scheduled initially for August, and the Large Area and Organic Electronics topic, which was scheduled initially for October. Together with some stragglers from the former Packaging issue, we have subsumed the articles from the latter topic under the headline “System Integration”.

The Smart Sensors topic and the offer regarding advertorials for a special price we have postponed to the April 2010 issue that will appear just 3 weeks before the international SENSOR+TEST-2010 Fair in Nuremberg.

mstnews is the magazine that strives to report on newly initiated and on ongoing R&D activities in the European Research Area. Being hosted by the Microsystems Programme manager VDI/VDE-IT, it is self-evident that it is most easy for mstnews to report first hand on the topical calls and R&D projects that have been initiated in the German Microsystems Framework Programme, which was launched for six years and will finish by the end of this year. In the mstnews issue 6/08 in December of last year we reported about 10 selected calls, now we have continued and finished this reporting with essays in this issue on the most recent six topical calls and a conclusion drawn by the new head of the Microsystems department of BMBF, Dr. Bernhard Rami. Fortunately, things are moving on: We are very glad to have the honour to publish his announcement of the continuation of the funding of Microsystems and Microsystems Technology in Germany in the years 2010+ first hand. Though mstnews is a commercial magazine and has not basically been financed by BMBF for 8 years anymore (!), we regard this continuation as a good precondition for our publication work in the coming years.
 
Taking into account the critical situation in the field of commercial advertising and the limited available budgets on the part of projects, networks, clusters and associations (our possible News Pages customers), we have decided to continue quarterly next year with four issues only and to “optimize” the dates of issue a little bit with respect to the terms of certain fairs and conferences and the vacation periods in summer and winter. In particular, we will provide a special issue 2/10 on “Trends in Sensor Technology” at the end of April, a few weeks before the international SENSOR+TEST 2010 Fair and Congress in Nuremberg on May 18-20. We have already agreed some technical contributions from the German Association of Sensor Manufacturers (AMA) and we have postponed our special offer to European sensor manufacturers to publish “advertorials” (advertising articles) on advanced sensor technologies and related innovative products for a very special price from this issue 4/09 to the special issue 2/10, where the advertorials surely will be more effective. You will find the complete scheduling of issues in 2010 on page 47 of the issue at hand. Please enjoy it!