Global competition in microelectronics has fuelled demands for medium and long term strategies in developing new technologies. These strategies must aim at practical applications as well as global requirements. Thus the global concept of sustainability gains importance for highly specified electronic industries.

With the intention to foster this concept the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) in cooperation with the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft (FHG) awarded the “Sustainability Award 2005” to Miss Kayoko Tsunezawa, a young Japanese scientist with high entrepreneurial and intercultural motivation. In his short laudation Prof. Dr. Max G. Huber, Vice President of the DAAD, emphasized the need to support the new generation of researchers and engineers to develop not only technological competence, but also an understanding of the main social, environmental and economical problems our generation has to solve.

The award giving ceremony was part of a symposium on advanced micro-system packaging with the title “Progress by Hetero System Integration” on April 7th, 2005 in Tokyo. It was hosted by Fraunhofer IZM Berlin, a research center for microelectronic packaging technologies. This symposium attracted over 180 participants from the Japanese electronics industry, academia and governmental organizations. The lively interest in advanced microsystem packaging shows once more how economically interesting an expansion of the German-Japanese cooperation can be.