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January 24, 2007...We've nailed down the dates for the next Compound Semi Vision get-together, June 19 and 20th. This year we've decided to hold it in our "hometown" of Austin, Texas. And three of our favorite CS supply chain industry CEOs have consented to serve as co-chairs this year: Bill Kroll, CEO and chairman of Matheson Tri-Gas; Phil Yin, president and CEO of AXT; and Keith Evans, president and CEO of Kyma Technologies. With a leadership team of that caliber, you better go ahead and just ink in June 19-20, 2007 on your calendars right now, because you won't want to miss this executive level business meet. CS Vision will run 8am-5pm Tuesday, June 19th and 8am-3pm, Wednesday, June 20th. Tuesday evening will be a networking reception followed, undoubtedly, by a trek through Austin's famed 6th Street music scene.

Here it is the depths of winter, and I get to plan our upcoming CS Vision conference for next June. Nothing like planning a truly hot conference, to be held in the last days of the upcoming Springtime in Texas, (which is the best time to visit Austin and the Texas Hill Country) to warm oneself when the temperatures are holding below freezing, day in and day out. This year, yours truly (Jo Ann McDonald, co-owner of CompoundSemi Online Inc. and founding editor of CompoundSemi News and LIGHTimes) will be the organizer and conference coordinator for CS Vision. If you don't recall, CS Vision is the follow-on to the old CS Outlook conferences, which date back to the mid-1990s... back when business was booming. With any luck, the compound semi business will soon boom again. The three distinguished and highly accomplished CEOs we've tagged to co-chair this year's CS Vision are clearly leading the way when it comes to bringing back the boom (or, at the very least, a little mild prosperity again). Thus, I'm thinking a good theme for this year's Vision should be "Taking the Lead." First, let me introduce to you Bill Kroll, Phil Yin, and Keith Evans, in the event that you haven't already had the pleasure of meeting them. Then I'll outline the basic structure for this year's Vision so that you can affix a Must Attend! notation after blocking off the June 19-20 dates on your calendar.

William J. Kroll, better known as "Bill" or simply "Kroll" to his friends, has been leading the way-- when it comes to the compound semi industry-- for decades. He's a man who truly knows everybody. Those of you who've worked with Bill at either Matheson Tri-Gas, (where he worked long before his memorable and noteworthy stint as executive VP of Emcore during the heydays of MOCVD in the mid 1990s) know that his influence and popularity is truly world renown. For example... if you attended a big SEMI show at his side, you'd find yourself stopping at almost every booth or pausing while Bill chatted in the aisles with about every-other person in the exhibit hall because that many people simply had to shake hands with the grand master. It was like walking around with someone running for a political office.

Bill Kroll worked originally with Matheson Gas Products Inc. starting in the late 1980s, serving for seven years as their senior VP of sales and marketing, responsible for $100 million in sales and 700 employees, worldwide. Before that, he was a VP of marketing for Machine Technology. But most in our industry got to know him from 1994 on at Emcore, until he returned to Matheson Tri-Gas to become CEO and chairman of Matheson Tri-Gas's board of directors. Two of the many memorable things about Bill while at Emcore were: 1) that he served as the executive catalyst who created GELcore, the solid state lighting JV between Emcore and GE, and... 2) that he served many years as the co-chair of the annual CS Outlook Conferences when they were under the direction of Gorham (with CS Online organizing the program). Each year we ask him to serve again as co-chair, and this year his schedule finally allows him to do so. Since he has such a long, strong history with this annual event, we should rightfully give him the title of Chairman Emeritus. In 2003, Bill also played a key role in our rollout of the original BLUE event in Dallas, Texas and did the honors with yours truly in presenting the first Compound Semi Pioneer Awards. Take a look at the pictures of that event...and when you attend this year's CS Vision 2007 in Austin, you'll see that neither Bill nor I have aged a bit! Well... at least Bill hasn't. And hey... we might just have a follow-on Pioneer Awards ceremony at this year's CS Vision. Winners traditionally have to be in actual attendance... yet another reason to plan to be there for sure! Because, who knows, one of the winners just might be you!

Bill Kroll completed his undergraduate and graduate work at Northwestern University. He's an established author, having penned more than 50 papers in the areas of physical and chemical vapor deposition for semiconductor technology, and he is a member of IEEE, SEMI, SPIE, SAE, The Electrochemical Society and MRS. Bill has served on the Boards of Princeton Photonics and Optoelectronics Materials Center, and currently serves on the boards of the CGA, AeA, IOMA, Matheson Tri-Gas, Inc. and Taiyo Nippon Sanso Corporation. Kroll was inducted into the New Jersey High Tech Hall of Fame in 2004, and was named as one of the top 25 Entrepreneurs in NJ by NJ Biz in 2006. Under Kroll’s leadership, Matheson Tri-Gas, Inc. was named Large Company of the Year by the New Jersey Technology Council in 2006. And in addition to being a master marketeer (especially in CS gasses and MOCVD technology), Bill Kroll is also a master sailboat skipper (and host).

Phil Yin is another silver fox who has held leadership positions in the compound semi industry for decades. When I had the pleasure of first getting to know Phil, he was serving as general manager of North America for Aixtron, a position he held from 2003 until taking over the helm at AXT in 2005. Prior to Aixtron, Phil... who holds a Ph.D. in material science from Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute... was sole proprietor of Philip S. Yin Consulting, specializing in epitaxial deposition, starting wafers, and strategic business development. From 1999 to 2002, he served as president of ATMI Epitaxial Services and prior to that he was senior VP, sales and marketing of Crysteco, and director of sales for Mitsubishi Silicon America. He came up through the ranks originally at Monsanto Electronics Materials and IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center. A former Marine, Phil's one of the most personable and jovial people I've ever had the pleasure of getting to know. He's so cool, that, as a 21 year member of "HOG" (Harley Owner's Group), in his spare time he serves on the Harley Davidson Advisory Panel (as in motorcycle giant). Phil's also a member of the Electrochemical Society, The American Association of Crystal Growth (AACG) and past executive committee member of the Northern California Crystal Growers (NCCG). In his role now as the head of AXT, and because of AXT's strong ties and many joint ventures in Asia, Phil is also considered a expert in doing business in mainland China. He also considered an expert in GaAs and InP substrate technology with exceptional breadth and depth of knowledge and understanding about epitaxy.

Keith Evans, who received his Ph.D. in physical chemistry from Purdue University, has a compound semi pedigree that would make anyone in the field envious. Getting his start in the field at the USA's Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) in Dayton, Ohio at Wright Patterson AFB, Keith built a world class Air Force research group while at AFRL, where he established a precedent-setting effort in the sensor-based control of MBE crystal growth and published over 200 publications. His decade plus at Wright Pat provided him with uniquely strong ties with all the DoD agencies involved in compound semi R&D, many of which help support Kyma's outstanding research and development in native GaN substrates. Keith left AFRL in 1996 to join a laser startup and has gone on to hold a number of key executive positions in the CS industry that span the entire supply chain including substrates, epitaxial growth, epitaxial growth equipment, and devices. Prior to becoming president and CEO of Kyma Technology, he served as senior VP business development and chief marketing officer for Crystal IS, where he enabled A-round equity financing and scored a key NIST ATP grant. Keith also served as VP of advanced technology at Veeco-St. Paul, where he developed and won funding for that company's Epitaxial Growth Process Integration Center (PIC). When he was VP of operations and advanced technology for QED, Keith drove record production efficiencies, revenues, and profits and proposed the successful merger between QED and Epitaxial Products International, which resulted in the formation of IQE. IQE quickly became the industry's largest compound semiconductor wafer manufacturer and it is still growing, as evidenced by the recent merger with Emcore's epitaxial group and the recent acquisition of MBE Technologies.

How are those for impressive biographies? And that's just our co-chairs for the event. Wait until you see the quality and number of market analysts we're inviting to speak at CS Vision in Austin on June 12-20, 2007 and out and out "visionaries." We're even inviting my peers in the semiconductor trade press to attend and take part in a panel or two. If they accept, I'm considering adding a seminar the day before the main conference for conference attendees and their young up and comers in IR and PR. The seminar would be led by senior press and investor relations gurus. It would be called (of course) "Tricks of the Trades" and provide unique insight for those seeking strategic and tactical knowledge in today's investor relations, press and public relations practices. As you can see, CS Vision is shaping up to be a true executive level business conference. And this year we're asking our keynoters and speakers to look further into the future than just the usual one or two years out. We're Taking the Lead (yeah... I like the sound of that as a theme) by looking five years out to see if, as a group of caring leaders, we can't reach some consensus as to how the CEOs and other senior managers of the companies in the compound semi industry supply chain might better prepare, and team, to provide truly superior materials, equipment, and expertise for their customers and fellow developers so that the compound semiconductors and their supporting technologies can even better prepare for future needs. We'll review what's been happening--and what to expect--in the sectors we cover in these pages: advanced communication, advanced solar, advanced sensors, laser diodes, and unique LEDs beyond solid state lighting applications, which we cover over our sister site, Solid State Lighting Net, at our annual BLUE event in Taiwan. This year, BLUE 2007 is slated for April 17-19. Note that the agenda for BLUE has just been posted. We'll have the website live for CS Vision 2007 ready soon.

Have you noticed that everything we cover at CS Vision and In CompoundSemi Online is preceded by the term "advanced"? That's because there's absolutely nothing retarded nor backward nor mundane when it comes to the compounds. Like our theme for CS Vision, the compounds are traditionally leading the way to better products for a higher quality of life for everyone... and their natural environments. Plan now to attend CS Vision 2007 June 19-20 in Austin and be part of the compound semi leadership team.

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Bill Kroll, Phil Yin and Keith Evans to Co-Chair CS Vision 2007 June 19-20

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