Here's a recap of news from last week's International Microwave Symposium (IMS) in San Francisco. There were far more product releases and announcements than I could keep track of, so apologies for those that I missed.

At Keysight's annual IMS press briefing, Mark Pierpoint, who is VP and GM of their Internet Infrastructure Solutions Group, said, "We're at the beginning of the golden age of wireless." I think this year's IMS reflected that.

Ampleon extended their power amplifier (PA) portfolio for pico, micro and wideband macrocells. They have developed a 12 V LDMOS process for lower power (¼ to 2 W) PAs.

Analog Devices (ADI) announced the RadioVerse™ "technology and design ecosystem" and unveiled a carrier-grade transceiver that covers 300 MHz to 6 GHz with 100 MHz of instantaneous bandwidth. Despite all the processing power, the AD9371 transceiver dissipates less than 5 W. We're getting closer to a base station on a chip.

Also, ADI and Escape Communications have partnered to create a reference design for a 10 Gbps E-Band link.

Arralis announced 94 GHz transmit and receive MMICs. The transmitter contains an up-converter with high image rejection, followed by a 13 dBm PA. The receiver integrates an LNA and mixer, with a combined noise figure under 5 dB and gain greater than 10 dB. Both are fabricated in PHEMT.

Broadcom introduced a chipset to create a 60 GHz mesh network, comprising baseband and transceiver ICs fabricated in CMOS. The baseband interfaces with multiple transceivers to support phased array antenna architectures.

Copper Mountain and Farran Technology announced a collaboration to create millimeter wave extensions to Copper Mountain's 9 GHz vector network analyzer (VNA). The Farran extensions cover 50 to 75, 60 to 90 and 75 to 110 GHz.

Custom MMIC introduced five new GaAs MMICs: DC to 22 and 2 to 22 GHz distributed amplifiers, a 26 to 35 GHz balanced driver and DC to 18 GHz SP3T and SP5T non-reflective switches. Despite the industry move to SOI, Custom MMIC is sticking with GaAs for their switch designs, saying GaAs achieves better performance.

In comparison, Integrated Device Technology (IDT) released two silicon switches. The SPDT absorptive designs cover 50 MHz to 8 GHz and achieve 0.9 dB loss and 66 dB isolation at 4 GHz. The two switches have similar RF performance, pin-out and control; one offers an enable/disable feature that allows all RF paths to be turned "off" and the VCTL feature disabled.

Among many IMS announcements, Keysight introduced a PXIe test system for cellular PAs and front-end modules (FEM). The M9111A is 20 times faster than prior Keysight units, a significant improvement for production test.

MACOM added 160 and 320 W GaN on Si power transistors to their wireless infrastructure portfolio. Packaged in plastic, the transistors cover the cellular bands from 1.8 to 2.2 GHz, providing linear gain to 20 dB and up to 79 percent efficiency.

Microsemi announced 15 new products at IMS, including six L-Band GaN drivers and power transistors that target avionics, radar and communications. The devices provide 120 to 750 W output power.

National Instruments (NI) introduced a measurement platform for the embryonic 802.11ax WLAN standard. 802.11ax is addressing high user density, interference and data rates to 10 Gbps — or so claimed. NI's system software can be updated as the ax standard evolves.

Anticipating the eventual arrival of small cells, NXP introduced eight, 28 V LDMOS Doherty PAs. These two-stage ICs — four symmetric and four asymmetric — cover 700 to 3800 MHz and provide 2.5 to 12 W output power, with gain ranging from 24 to 31 dB.

Peregrine introduced an 8 to 12 GHz beam former with 6-bit amplitude and phase control. Key specs of the SOI die are 44 dBm input IP3 and 50 dB isolation. Peregrine also introduced a Ku-Band image reject mixer. The passive, double-balanced design integrates two mixers, a 90 degree coupler for the LO path and RF port baluns on a single SOI die. It supports an RF frequency range of 10 to 19 GHz, LO from 12 to 19 GHz and IF from DC to 4 GHz.

Qorvo introduced six, 50 V GaN power transistors for radar, avionics and communications. The devices operate up to 4 GHz with saturated output power from 10 to 125 W. For wireless infrastructure, the company displayed three GaN drivers and PAs, including an asymmetric Doherty designed for China Mobile's 2575 to 2635 MHz band. The PA provides 36 W average at 53 percent efficiency and 15.9 dB gain. For indoor small cells and distributed amplifier systems (DAS), Qorvo announced eight PAs that are drop-ins for similar ANADIGICS amplifiers. The PAs provide either 24 or 27 dBm linear output and -47 dBc ACLR.

Skyworks introduced three 1 W MMICs for small cells. These PAs cover 728 to 768, 850 to 900 and 2100 to 2200 MHz, each with gain greater than 36 dB.

TRAK released a surface-mount circulator for X-Band phased arrays. Designed to replace circulators requiring a cut-out in the PCB, this SMT design has 10 percent bandwidth, greater than 20 dB isolation and a maximum insertion loss of 0.45 dB.

WIN Semiconductors announced volume production in its third 150 mm wafer fab. Fab C presently has 3,000 wafer-per-month capacity; a further expansion, scheduled to be online by the end of 2016, will increase output to 5,500 wafers per month.

We'll have a longer summary of company news from IMS in our final Online Show Daily, which will be published Thursday, June 2.

Finally, on a lighter note: good ideas for robots, yet these prototypes aren't ready for market launch.

Have a good week.