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2016
Journal Article
Titel
The 2015 SVC TechCon special issue. Preface
Abstract
This Special Issue contains a select number of papers from The Society of Vacuum Coaters 58th Annual Technical Conference, held in Santa Clara, California, April 25-30, 2015. The Society of Vacuum Coaters (SVC) serves a broad community of scientists, engineers, and business men and women interested in applying and advancing vacuum coating, surface engineering and related technologies. The annual ""TechCon"" is the flagship event of the Society. It includes a four-day technical program of invited, contributed and poster presentations focused on the basic and applied research of interest to the Society's membership, a variety of business-related topics, a dedicated product session, numerous interactive technology forums, unique networking opportunities, a diverse program of short courses, and the largest technology exhibit of its kind. The 2015 TechCon featured the Symposium Coating Technologies for the Interconnected Age, a topic well aligned with the expertise in both California's Silicon Valley, where the latest technologies for the ""Internet of Things"" are forged, and the capabilities within the SVC community. Indeed, thin films, coatings and engineered surfaces play a key role in advancing mobility, durability and performance of mobile electronics as well as the infrastructure to connect them; and so, daily keynote presentations, focus sessions, tutorials and forums dedicated to the symposium topic were easily woven together with our more traditional topics, including: WebTech Roll-to-Roll Coatings for High-End Applications; Coatings for Energy Conversion and Related Processes; Protective, Tribological and Decorative Coatings; Emerging Technologies; High Power Impulse Magnetron Sputtering (HIPIMS); Optical Coatings; Plasma Processing; Coatings for Biomedical and Environmental Applications; and Large Area Coatings. Given the breadth of topics in this year's TechCon, some of the papers in this issue will cover subject matter that is not typically found within the pages of Surface and Coatings Technology. For the interested reader, the full set of papers is available in the Society of Vacuum Coaters 58th (2015) Annual Technical Conference Proceedings published by the SVC, as well as in the Digital Library on the SVC website (svc.org). The assembly of the program and organization of the conference obviously requires the collective effort of a large number of people. The Program Committee members, Technical Advisory Committee chairs and members for developing the technical program; Management Plus, Inc. (MPI) and the conference support staff under the direction of Vivienne Mattox for running the conference; and the generous support of the companies exhibiting at the conference and supporting the SVC, are gratefully acknowledged. For this Issue, the Guest Editors would like to thank the able staff at Elsevier and Beth Strong from MPI for tracking progress and correspondence with the authors, and Allan Matthews, for his help in developing this issue. And finally, we thank the authors, who contributed to this Special Issue.