The European Workshop on ''Materials for Advanced Metallization 2008" was held in The Westin Bellevue hotel, Dresden, Germany, situated in the Dresden on the Elbe river, from March 2-5, 2008. Dresden is the state capital of Saxony and one of the cultural and art centers in Germany. It offers attractions in great variety. No book about the history of architecture can miss mentioning the Dresden Zwinger Palace. The Frauenkirche (Church of Our Lady), Semper Opera House and Royal Castel as well as many other historic monuments and ensembles, which are all located on the banks of the river Elbe, determine the skyline of the city.
The conference participants enjoyed a dinner on the Elbe river boat ''August der Starke" on Monday night.
Dresden is not only a historic town with a downtown mainly shaped during the Baroque era, is nowadays one of Europe's centers of micro-and nanoelectronics. The 200 and 300 mm fabs of Infineon Technologies, Qimonda and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), the X-Fab for ASICs and custom designed ICs, the Advanced Mask Technology Center as well as a lot of small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) in the field of design, testing, service and support count to what is meanwhile called the Saxon Silicon Valley.
A number of research institutes with a strong focus on basic and applied research in the field of processes, equipment, materials, and metrology are located in the Dresden region. Further research in these fields is performed together with high level education at the three Saxon Universities of Technology in Dresden, Freiberg and Chemnitz. This year's workshop was the 17th in a series of European Workshops which have been dealing with advances in the field of materials and processes for silicides and metallization as well as their integration mainly for IC application. The RMS (Refractory Metals and Silicides) workshop series started in Firenze,