As this month's WaveGuide makes its way over the internet and into your e-mail inbox, many of you are deeply immersed in creating marketing literature, data sheets and booth graphics for the upcoming season of trade shows. Whether your company’s engineering department orchestrates the release of new products to coincide with industry events or not, these gatherings represent the best opportunity to promote your latest solutions. While some traditionalists may wait until the event to make big announcements, it is advantageous to announce major releases before the trade show, enticing attendees with a pre-view of products and avoiding getting lost in the noise.  

At the Journal, we support pre-event promotions in multiple ways, from our show preview issues in May and September (IMS and EuMW respectively) to our online daily landing page and show daily newsletters. This month, our May issue will feature approximately 120 new products from 100 different companies exhibiting in Seattle. With over 550 exhibitors expected at IMS, this annual show preview is a guide for engineers to identify the latest must-see products and which companies to visit. If you are responsible for marketing and your product is scheduled to appear in the new products section of this year’s May issue, get optimal exposure by directing customers and prospects to your product listing online or informing them what page your product is on in either our print or digital edition. For instance, add some promotional copy to your company’s website and newsletters to guide your audience to important product developments - “Check out our new Components in the May Issue of Microwave Journal, Page XX and Visit us in Booth #123 at IMS in Seattle.” Furthermore, use social media such as Linked-in and Twitter to help direct potential customers to your presence in Microwave Journal.

These show issues (IMS and EuMW in the U.S./Europe/Asia and EDI CON in China) celebrate technology being presented in the conferences and new products being shown off in the exhibitions. In doing so, they give MWJ editors and readers an opportunity to consider the industry as a whole and note how technology is evolving. In Seattle, we will have the opportunity to discuss your company’s developments face to face and plan out our editorial coverage for the second half of the year. Meanwhile, work is already well underway for our June Semiconductor/RFIC/MMIC issue. Semiconductor technology is among the most dynamic and challenging areas in RF/microwave R&D. This year we look at the recent developments in the ongoing battle for RF power amplifier supremacy in the mobile handset market with a point/counter-point cover story co-authored by Qualcomm and Skyworks. Another CMOS pioneer, Peregrine Semiconductor,  offers a tech brief on a new digitally tuned capacitor ideal for dynamic impedance matching or attenuation.  Gallium Nitride (GaN), another semiconductor material making news, is the focus of a perspective editorial piece from RFHIC. And we also present this month’s most valuable product, a USB pulsed power sensor from Boonton, whose real-time response capability is made possible with the latest FPGA from Xilinx. The engineering activity in RF/microwave semiconductor technology makes June is one of our most popular topics.

Following up our look at the state of semiconductor technology, we turn our attention to the products helping engineers with the challenges of RF design and in particular the state of RF/microwave design tools, EDA software and integration/workflows across various design stages and diverse software products from a host of vendors. We are anticipating content from software/measurement equipment vendors such as Agilent, AWR, ANSYS, CST, NI, Cadence, Mentor Graphics and more. As engineering problems grow more complex and expensive to develop, designers are increasingly relying on the abilities of simulation to provide engineering answers before fabricating and testing expensive prototypes, especially for larger circuits and systems. Chip/package/board co-design, mixed RF/microwave and high-speed digital signals and a host of other design challenges require increasing computational power and design automation. In our cover story we survey the leading companies for a glimpse of where these tools are at in 2013.