The Advanced Engineering UK group of events takes place in Birmingham, UK’s National Exhibition Centre (NEC) on 12-13th November 2013. Run by UK Tech Events, it includes five shows: Aero Engineering, Composites Engineering, Automotive Engineering, Auto Electronics and Printable Electronics. This year promises 200 technical presentations and 600 exhibitors. The conference programme director is Dr Neil Calder.
Neil Calder is conference programme director at this year’s Advanced Engineering Show in the UK
It’s been a long time since an electronics show in the UK attracted an impressive number of visitors. Recent ’embedded’ conferences and exhibitions have been heralded as successes if 1200 people attended. Compare that with the 15,000 plus visitors to Nuremberg’s Embedded World. But maybe the co-location of several shows is the way forward. Electronics engineers are no longer just involved with circuit design. The availability of free or low-cost tools mean that they often now handle PCB layout too. And with the increasing importance of packaging design in the marketing of electronic products, the same engineers are likely to become involved in 3D design and modelling in the near future, and perhaps in selecting the composite materials from which packaging is to be made.
The topics at this event therefore have significant synergy. Even if they don’t have a direct professional interest in all of the shows at the Birmingham event, the natural curiosity of engineers, and perhaps their popular interest in cars and the automotive industry in general, may well bring them flooding in. The show had 9000 visitors last year.
