From May 4th to 7th, 1998, the "21st International Spring Seminar on Electronics Technology" took place in "Hotel Wende, Neusiedl am See", Austria, with the main subject "Advanced Electronics Technology". The chairman of this seminar was Prof. Nicolics from the "Institute of Material Science for Electrical Engineering" at Vienna University of Technology. 20 Sponsors have supported this seminar with over one hundred participants in 7 oral and 10 poster sessions. The organizer in cooperation with the steering committee selected 22 papers for oral presentation and additional 50 for poster presentation. The 7 sessions for oral presentation were focused on the following topics:

• Technological education at university level
• Collaborative research and engineering programs
• New packaging concepts
• Advanced interconnection technology
• New sensors and sensor packaging
• Trends in circuit design
• Process modeling and manufacturing technology

The 10 sessions for poster presentation in addition to these topics also were focused on:

• Materials technology
• Semiconductor technology
• Thin film and thick film technology
• Materials processing with lasers
• Thermal management
• Circuit modeling
• Process simulation
• Quality assurance

71 contributions were published in the proceedings (299 pages). The International Steering Committee was extended to 14 members from 12 nations, hereunder for the first time from the USA (Prof Gielisse, Florida State University Tallahassee), United Kingdom (Prof. Sinnadurai, The Welding Institute) and Slovenia (Prof. Hrovat, Josef Stefan Institute, Ljubljana). Prof. Licznerski, Wroclaw University of Technology, was elected as Honorary Member. After the sessions of this seminar the Steering Committee published the following conclusions:

"ISSE´ 98 was organized …on a very high level, and in an extremely nice venue. The primary aims of the Seminar that is to provide an international forum for dissemination of information and scientific results relating to education, research and development activity at Universities in the field of electronics technology and to get together the professors of common interest from Central European countries, has been achieved. The Seminar attracted the professors, scientists and research students of thirteen nations, and both the scientific level and the presentation of the nearly 80 contributions was very high. In particular the Poster Sessions, including about two third of all presentations, were very successful."

The poster session evaluation was organized by Prof. Becker, who did this "job" In the same perfect matter like he did for many, many years.

Prof. Illyefalvi-Vitez, who participated in the 1st Academic Conference at PRC Georgia Tech in March 1998, informed about this newly-started conference series with a similar goal as the Spring Seminars and proposed to contact the organizers of the Academic Conferences, in order to involve a few people into the work of both conferences.

During every ISSE a number of universities applied for organizing the next and the next but one seminar. So in the "conclusions" of 1998 it means: "the Committee asked Prof. Sauer to host the 22nd ISSE in the area of Dresden in the first week of May, 1999. Prof. Philippov, Prof. Svasta and Dr. Hrovat are also asked to examine the possibilities to hold a low price level seminar in Bulgaria, in Romania or in Slovenia, in year 2000."

"The Steering Committee had the sad obligation to inform the participants of ISSE´98 that Prof. Ryšánek, the founder of our Spring Seminars, the Honorary Chairman of the Steering Committee, who has been a devoted participant of the Seminars and who had chaired great many Seminars and Sessions of this series, passed away on March 4th, 1998. …"

A one page history about his work and life was published in the proceedings.