EDS Vacuum Devices Technical Committee Report

 

Renuka P. Jindal

James A. Dayton Jr.

EDS Vacuum Devices Technical Committee Report It was mid afternoon in Europe and early morning in the eastern US on February 11, 1998 as the EDS Technical Committee on Vacuum Devices began its first meeting, a virtual meeting conducted via teleconference. To accommodate all of the international members, the teleconference was conducted in two stages, the second stage taking place on the evening of February 12 (the morning of February 13 in Asia). The matters discussed that day have set much of the agenda for the work of the Technical Committee in the subsequent four years.

The Technical Committee on Vacuum Devices had been formally established by EDS only a few days earlier on February 3. The membership of the committee represented not only diverse geographic regions, but also the wide range of technical disciplines that are embodied within vacuum electronics. They came from industry, from academia and from government labs. It was a mixture of old friends and strangers, arch competitors and longtime collaborators, ranging in age from over 70 to under 30. And yet, from this diverse group came one clear and unifying message: the field of vacuum electronics must have an annual international conference rotating between Europe, Asia and the USA.

Subsequent teleconferences in March and April and numerous conversations within the vacuum electronics community resulted in the formulation of a plan for what has become the EDS International Vacuum Electronics Conference (IVEC). An article which features plans for the fourth IVEC to be held in May in Seoul, Korea can be found elsewhere in this issue of the Newsletter.

In establishing IVEC, there was a strong sentiment within the Technical Committee to avoid adding yet another date to a sometimes crowded calendar of meetings by drawing specialized meetings and local conferences into IVEC. Within Europe this was readily accomplished. The European Space Agency had previously sponsored workshops on traveling wave tubes for space applications, and they very generously offered to expand the technical scope of this venue, which had always been open to international participation, to become the European leg of IVEC. The second IVEC conference was held in Noordwijk, The Netherlands in 2001. In Asia there was no competing precedent for a large general conference in the field. The challenge for IVEC was to establish a viable international venue within the USA.

For more than 20 years the US vacuum electronics community had been holding biennial meetings of the Microwave Power Tube Conference in Monterey, CA under the sponsorship of the DoD Advisory Group on Electron Devices with the assistance of the US vacuum device industry. Early on, this had been a classified conference that was restricted to US nationals. Over the years the conference had ceased to be classified, but the restriction to participation only by US citizens and permanent US residents had continued. Under DoD sponsorship, the Monterey Conference was a hybrid technical conference and military business meeting.

This military emphasis had become less relevant as significant commercial and civilian applications of vacuum devices had emerged, particularly in the 1990’s with the rapid growth of telecommunications. Nonetheless, when speaking collectively, US industry was absolutely opposed to any change in the US only format, and it appeared for a time that a US leg of IVEC would be in direct competition with the traditional Monterey Conference. Quite surprisingly, a different picture emerged in private conversations with US industry leaders, who nearly unanimously supported the change to international participation, but assumed that they were alone in that opinion.

And so, the technical aspects of the old Monterey Conference became the US leg of IVEC, but the power of tradition must never be underestimated. Monterey, CA has continued to be the site of the US leg of IVEC in 2000, 2002 and 2004. As one European committee member put it, “If, after 20 years, you Americans are finally going to let us come to the Monterey Conference, you had better hold it in Monterey.”

The second most visible accomplishment of the Technical Committee has been to establish the IVEC Award for Excellence in Vacuum Electronics. The detailed mechanics of the award process are described on the IVEC 2003 website at ivec2003@plaza.snu.ac.kr. Briefly, the award is to be presented each year at IVEC; any living person or group within the vacuum electronics community can be a candidate; the nomination process is patterned after the IEEE Fellow nomination; and selection is made by a vote of the Technical Committee. The award was presented for the first time at IVEC 2002 to Dr. Armand Staprans of Communications and Power Industries, Inc.

The training of the next generation of vacuum device engineers has also been a significant concern of the Technical Committee from its inception. The Technical Committee has used the vehicle of the IVEC Plenary Sessions to promote exchanges of information about successful educational programs and to survey the perceptions of the younger members of the profession regarding their training experiences and opportunities for professional growth.

The present members of the Technical Committee are B.N. Basu of Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, India; Ivor Brodie, SRI International, Menlo Park, CA; Richard G. Carter, Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK; Jon A. Christensen, Boeing Electron Dynamic Devices, Torrance, CA; Kwo Ray Chu, National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu, Taiwan; James A. Dayton, Jr. (Chairman), Genvac Corp and Consultant, Cleveland, OH; Takao Kageyama, NEC Corp. Sagamihara, Japan; Gunter Kornfeld, Thales Electron Devices GmbH, Ulm, Germany; Carol L. Kory (Executive Assistant), NASA/Analex Corp., Cleveland, OH; Sheng Gang Liu, University of Electronic Science and Technology, Chengdu, China; Neville C. Luhmann, Jr., University of California, Davis, CA; W. Devereux Palmer, Army Research Office, Durham, NC; Gun-Sik Park, Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea; Robert K. Parker, Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, DC; Armand Staprans, Communications and Power Industries, Palo Alto, CA; Philippe Thouvenin, Thales Electron Devices, Velizy, France; Richard B. True, Northrop Grumman Electron Devices, San Carlos, CA; and Pierre Waller, ESA/ESTEC, Noordwijk, The Netherlands.

James A. Dayton, Jr.
Consultant
Cleveland, OH, USA