The 24^th edition of IEEE Real Time made its long-awaited but successful return to an in-person conference this spring (April 22^th – 26^th) in the beautiful coastal city of Quy Nhon, Vietnam. It had been six years since our last in-person gathering (2018 in Williamsburg, Virginia, USA), and for those of us who have for many years been regular attendees and organizers it was an engaging week that quickly reminded us of how important it is to have all the participants together in one place again.

This year’s conference brought together 174 participants from 21 different countries. Roughly 43% were students. For around 50% of participants this was their first Real Time Conference experience. Not surprisingly, the geographic demographics were heavily weighted in favor of Asia at almost 75%.

Thanks to the International Center of Interdisciplinary Science and Education

Much of the conference’s success can be attributed to the enthusiastic and professional staff of the International Center of Interdisciplinary Science and Education (ICISE) headed locally by Dr. Trần Thanh Son. The center is located in a beautiful and quiet location just outside of the city and provided a perfect setting for a conference of our size.

Participants were able to maximize engagement with other attendees through the plenary oral and mini-oral sessions, the two poster sessions as well as the lunchtime and evening social events at the center held throughout the week. In addition to the ICISE staff, we had valuable program and logistics support from colleagues at the Ho Chi Minh University of Science, including Dr. Tran Thien Thanh, Dr. Hoang Thi Kieu Trang and Dr. Vo Hong Hai.

A two day preconference workshop was held at the ICISE center on Saturday and Sunday (April 20^th – 21^st). The focus of the training was on several new and valuable open-source tools for general FPGA and ASIC development. Topics included Cocotb, SURF, FABulous eFPGAs and openLANE, Skywater and Caravel. 

Conference Highlights

Conference plenary highlights included a welcome presentation from NPSS president Dr. Vesna Sossi followed by an engaging talk from Dr. Olivier Limousin, Research Director for the Astrophysics Division (CEA, France), on High Performance Imaging Spectrometers for Space Science and Societal Applications. Later in the week we heard from Dr. Nguyen Kien Cuong, the director of the Dalat, Vietnam research nuclear reactor, on radio isotope production and their new research reactor project that will greatly expand their current capabilities. Dr. Stefan Ritt gave attendees an entertaining live presentation of his talk on mastering picosecond precision in large-scale timing systems. This presentation is also available to stream from the NPSS website. During the week, Stefan also put together and posted a very nice video montage of many conference activities. Be sure to check it out on the NPSS website as well.

Awards

This year’s CANPS Award winner, Dr. Patrick Le Dû (CEA, retired) could not make the long trip to Vietnam for the conference, but he was able to give us a wonderful live remote presentation about his many experiences and contributions, over 50 years, to nuclear instrumentation for high energy physics at CERN and their applications to medical imaging and radiotherapy. Of course, Patrick has also been a constant advocate in the support and management of the CANPS technical committee and the Real Time Conference. We are eternally grateful for all his time and insight these many years.

The Student Paper Award competition become a very difficult decision this year for the review committee. All the submissions were of high quality. In the end the committee chose to recognize four papers with certificates of excellence. Two of these papers were awarded first prize which comes with a $500 cash award. The first prize winners were – César Gonzáles Brito, from the Technical University of Madrid, for his paper “Integration of Hardware Acceleration Techniques in Real-Time Framework using FPGAs devices” and Jieyu Zhu, from the Institute of Modern Physics Chinese Academy of Sciences, for his paper “Front-end Electronics for the Prototype of the HERD Transition Radiation Detector.” The additional certificates for second and third prize were given to Ting Wang, from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), for her paper “A Compact Readout Electronics Based on Current Amplifier of Micromegas Detector,” and Dongwei Zou, also from USTC, for his paper “A Low-Complexity MLSE Algorithm for NRZ High-Speed Transceivers.”

2026 Real Time Conference

We closed out a very busy conference week with the announcement for the next Real Time. In 2026, we will not only be returning to Europe, but also to Italy (RTC 2016 was in Padua). The 25^th Real Time Conference will be held at La Biodola on Elba Island from May 25^th – 29^th, 2026. The host and General Chair for this meeting will be CANPS committee member Dr. Riccardo Paoletti, from the University of Siena and INFN Pisa. This venue has been a very popular stop for small conferences such as Real Time, and we look forward to meeting once again in this beautiful seaside location. We hope to see you there as well.

For more information, visit our Conference website: https://indico.cern.ch/e/rt2024. David J Abbott, CANPS Chair, can be reached by E-mail at [email protected]