May 07, 2013 
SMART Group, Europe’s largest technical trade association focusing on surface mount and related technologies, announces that its annual SMART Group European Conference & Table Top Exhibition will be held from 2-3 October 2013 at the Spread Eagle Hotel in Cornmarket Thame, Oxfordshire, England.
The business cycle is turning with good signs that the rush to off-shore manufacturing is being reversed. The theme of this year’s conference is improving efficiency in order to win that new business. To provide the best coverage of this topic, SMART’s Conference will provide keynote presentations on both theory and practice.
The practical keynote will be the world famous Raspberry Pi project. The Raspberry Pi is a credit-card sized computer that plugs into a TV and a keyboard. It is a capable little PC designed as a low cost teaching and fun tool for kids all over the world to learn programming. But Raspberry Pi also is an example of onshore manufacturing — it is being manufactured in UK. Speakers will explain how even this low-cost (by definition) business was won.
The more theoretical keynote will illustrate how academia, government initiatives, funding and facilities are interacting with industry to create a beneficial exchange of ideas and a favourable climate to promote new products for UK producers.
The remaining conference sessions will address a range of topics from yield improvement to material selection opportunities from new technologies, latest developments in improving quality through proper use of the latest technology in failure analysis and so on.
In addition to the conference, the table top exhibition again will be held for companies that wish to interact with the industry’s major users and practitioners.
This is the first in a series of updates from The SMART Group about its conference and exhibition.
For additional information or to register to attend, contact Tony Gordon at info@smartgroup.org or +44 [0]1494 465217.
