Figure 1 MTT-S IMS attendee totals (pre-liminary numbers for 2010).
This year's MTT-S IMS seemed to be a turning point for the industry as the business atmosphere seemed very positive and the show floor busier than the past few years. Going back to Hawaii in 2007, where the total attendance declined significantly, the number of people attending has increased each year; the preliminary numbers this year showed a seven percent increase in total attendance (see Figure 1). The IEEE reported preliminary numbers of 9500 attendees, with technical registration numbers totaling 2,793 participants with 858 papers submitted and over 250 presented orally. The interactive forum saw 122 papers presented and new tracks were added for emerging technologies. This year's IMS Chairman, JK McKinney, and his team did a great job running the event and the technical program was strong.
Madhu Gupta, Chairman of the IMS Technical Program Committee, had 32 sub-committees reviewing papers and this year added a new category called New Emerging Technologies. The committee then found appropriate experts in each area to evaluate them. New sessions were added for RFID, high power microwaves for industrial/material processing and power scavenging technologies.
Other happenings included the student paper and design contests, panel sessions, workshops, short courses, MicroApps seminars on the show floor and the historical exhibit, which means there was no shortage of technical content for the week. The plenary presentation was Tuesday with the Honorable Zachary J. Lemnios, CTO for the Department of Defense (DoD), discussing an overview of a number of defense related technology opportunities and challenges.
The RFIC Symposium took place on Sunday through Tuesday with workshops, sessions and a plenary session Sunday evening on "RF Power Amplification: Can CMOS Deliver?" by David J. Allstot of the University of Washington and "RF Application Trends of the Next Decade" by Gregory L. Waters, Executive VP and General Manager of Skyworks.
The ARFTG Microwave Measurement Conference took place on Friday and included technical presentations, an interactive forum and exhibition. The conference theme was "Measurement of Modulated Signals for Communications."
The commercial side of the event (aka - the exhibition) saw good traffic and increased activity from what most exhibitors reported to us. The exhibit floor showcased a total of 556 companies and 892 booths representing 40 countries to support the event. The exhibit-only registration numbers indicated 2,687 participants according to a preliminary count. The MicroApps presentations on the show floor attracted a wide audience and array of technologies; it seems to be coming into its own as an attraction for more applications oriented topics.
Some of the trends that we found were increased PIM testing (probably becoming a standard test soon for base stations), nonlinear behavioral modeling increasing its adoption, increased sensitivity/speed in test equipment to find signals that previously would not be detected, an increased presence of CMOS and GaN devices, high efficiency amplifiers (Doherty, feed forward, envelope tracking, etc., with one paper on 90 percent efficient devices), new low noise amplifiers with less than 0.5 dB noise figure for cellular applications, new compact filters for co-existence of signals in mobile applications, very low phase noise sources and new passive integration platforms.
Microwave Journal editors were extremely busy visiting exhibitors and covering the event. See our final coverage of the show from our link on the Events page at www.mwjournal.com/IMS2010Wrap for a complete summary of the new products and demos on the exhibition floor, video interviews and product demonstrations, photos, show news and more.
