The Third IEEE International Vacuum Electronics Conference (IVEC) was held in Monterey, California, April 23-25, 2002. With nearly 400 attendees and over 200 presented papers, IVEC 2002 established a new Conference record.

Vacuum Electron Devices (VEDs), which include microwave tubes, essentially involve the extraction of RF energy from free electrons in a vacuum. VEDs are powerful, efficient, reliable and affordable devices which are used in a wide range of modern and legacy system applications. Some of these applications include military/defense, space and ground communications, radar, particle accelerators, plasma heating, homeland security, meteorology, displays, and food processing. IVEC 2002 General Chairman, Dr. Richard True of Northrop Grumman Electron Devices, San Carlos, California (formerly Litton) had this to say after the meeting: "The future for vacuum electronics and vacuum electron devices appears indeed bright."

IVEC 2002 opened with a Plenary Session in which seven distinguished scientists presented talks on a wide area of vacuum electronics science. In addition to the plenary talks, there were ten keynote talks (including two invited papers) presented in the 24 IVEC Oral Sessions. There were also two large Poster Sessions in which authors had a chance to present their work and interact with interested participants on a more personalized basis.

You can read more about the material presented at the conference by visiting the IVEC 2002 website, https://ivec2002.org, where a more complete conference summary is posted along with numerous informative links. You can reference the digest of IVEC 2002 abstracts under IEEE Catalog Number 02EX524, ISBN 0-7803-7256-5, Library of Congress: 2001095310. In addition, Dr. Dan Goebel, VED Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices (T-ED) has asked authors to submit IVEC papers to IEEE T-ED, so watch there for upcoming publications from IVEC 2002.

IVEC is scheduled to repeat every other year in the USA, rotating to Europe and Asia every fourth year. IVEC 2003 will be held in Seoul, Korea, on May 28, 29, and 30 and will be held in tandem with the International Conference on Plasma Science (ICOPS). In 2004, IVEC will return to Monterey, and in 2005 it will be held in Noordwijk, The Netherlands.