With some 17 companies on hand for the industrial exhibition at The 5th International Conference on MicroManufacturing (ICOMM/4M 2010) held in April at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the mix of industry and academia proved a success, according to representatives of the ICOMM organizing committee.
Not only did ICOMM generate 86 technical papers from 20 countries, it captured the attention of a record number of companies that showed up to display products and services—and, in part, to present new research and development projects to about 150 attendees.
"I would rate this the best ICOMM in terms of attendance and in terms of industry participation," said Kornel F. Ehmann, a professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Northwestern University, Chicago, and a founding member of ICOMM. "Also, what is notable—the breadth of the areas we covered here, the interdisciplinary nature of the contributions and the crowds that showed up.
"We are branching out into bio-based manufacturing, lasers and all kinds of new technology and combinations of these technologies into hybrid processes, where in the space of a single machine you can simultaneously perform more than one type of operation," continued Ehmann.
"Perhaps the next thing we'll see is the combination of top down and bottom up processes for the creation of components or features that were not imaginable before," he added.
Frank Pfefferkorn, the ICOMM/4M 2010 conference chair and an associate professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at UW-Madison, credited a maturing micromanufacturing industry for the increased interest from industry. He cited, in particular, the fact that there is now a magazine (MICROmanufacturing) covering the field.
Fellow ICOMM organizing committee member Jian Cao, a professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Northwestern University in Chicago, echoed the notion that micromanufacturing as an industry is maturing. Specifically, she observed, companies are becoming more profitable and there is more business for them.
What’s more, she added, companies that could make very small tools 30 years ago had no market compared to now when they are being asked to make tools even smaller.
Among the companies to exhibit at ICOMM/4M were:
For more about the ICOMM/4M 2010, check out the ICOMM report, the ICOMM tour or any of the focus reports on some of the companies that exhibited at the gathering, including
Alicona,
LasX Industries,
Nikon Metrology and
Performance Micro Tool.
ICOMM/4M 2010 deemed success
