Gary Lerude, MWJ Technical Editor
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Gary Lerude is the Technical Editor of Microwave Journal. Previously, he spent his career as a “midwife” aiding the growth of the compound semiconductor industry, from device to application, from defense to commercial. He spent 19 years at Texas Instruments, 11 years at MACOM and six years with TriQuint. Gary holds a bachelor’s in EE, a master’s in systems engineering and an engineers degree (ABD) in EE.

Weekly Report

For the week ending July 1

July 4, 2016

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Here's my weekly report, a recap of recent industry news worth noting.

Companies and Products

CTS added three low jitter clock oscillators and upgraded two previously released products in the family. Models 638 and 655 achieve 100 fs phase jitter for frequencies between 125 and 170 MHz. The model 633 generates clock rates between 10 and 220 MHz, with phase jitter less than 500 fs.

Google Fiber is buying Webpass, a Gbps internet service provider that serves San Francisco, Oakland, San Diego, Miami, Chicago and Boston. The acquisition expands Google Fiber's current footprint, which comprises Atlanta, Austin, Kansas City, Nashville and Provo. Google Fiber had plans to grow to more than 20 cities before announcing the Webpass acquisition.

Harris received a $27 million add-on for ship protection decoys for NRL's Advanced Decoy Architecture Project (ADAP), which is an upgrade to the Nulka decoy.

Innovative Integration announced the K706 digital transceiver, which integrates a four channel direct down-conversion (DDC) receiver, two channel direct up-conversion (DUC) transmitter and spectrum analyzer with a Xilinx Kintex-7 FPGA. Both the DDC and DUC have programmable tuners that cover 1 MHz to 1 GHz with a resolution of 0.2328 Hz.

Inphi is selling its memory segment to Rambus for $90 million. This move focuses the company on optical networking, from long haul to data center. GigPeak, MACOM and Qorvo are pursuing the same market.

Mercury Systems received the 3-Star Supplier Excellence Award from Raytheon's Integrated Defense Systems (IDS). The award recognizes Mercury Systems' Camarillo and San Jose, Calif. facilities for on-time delivery and quality performance.

Modelithics announced version 16.1 of the COMPLETE library formatted for the NI AWR Design Environment. This release adds 33 new models from 13 suppliers.

NXP released a SiGe LNA with SP3T switch for 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. The BGS8324 has 2 dB noise figure, 16 dB gain, input 1 dB compression of -6 dBm and a bypass option for the LNA.

Skyworks won virtually all the RF sockets in Huawei's P9 smartphones. The 10 Skyworks' ICs include SkyOne FEMs for low, mid and high bands. Huawei is the third largest handset supplier, shipping more than 100 million phones in 2015.

Vaunix released a USB digital attenuator with 120 dB attenuation range, 0.1 dB step size, 9 dB minimum loss and a frequency range from 200 MHz to 6 GHz. The unit sells for $875.

The U.S. Department of Commerce granted ZTE an extension of an export license until August 30. The temporary license, which was scheduled to expire June 30, allows ZTE to continue receiving exports from U.S. suppliers while they reform their export compliance program.

Markets and Technology

Cellular — Even before downlink carrier aggregation becomes the norm, uplink carrier aggregation is rolling out in South Korea and China. Operators and network equipment manufacturers are adding bandwidth to respond to the growth in user-posted video.

5G — Qualcomm announced a 5G new radio (NR) prototype for end-to-end testing of OFDM-based air interfaces below 6 GHz. The 5G NR testbed, which includes a base station and user equipment, supports RF bandwidths greater than 100 MHz and is capable of multi-Gbps data rates.

At last week's 5G world conference, Nokia demonstrated a 5G network using their Airscale RAN with a cloud packet core on the Airframe data center.

At the same conference, Ericsson and King's College London demonstrated the 5G robotic surgery use case, using a low latency software defined network (SDN). The demo drew no blood.

Ericsson also demonstrated a 7.5 Gbps data rate link to a moving vehicle using their prototype 5G radio with massive MIMO.

Broadband — Gogo and ViaSat are competing to provide your in-flight internet experience. Being the first mover, Gogo has the market share advantage, although their initial air-to-ground system lacks the bandwidth of satellite — which ViaSat offers and Gogo is moving to deploy. Waterman Research compares the two companies.

IoT — The 3GPP completed the NB-IOT standard in Release 13, which tailors the LTE network to handle IoT applications requiring low power consumption and long battery life.

Not surprisingly, AT&T chose LTE for their IoT network. They plan Cat-M1 (LTE-M) trials during Q4 and Cat-M2 in 2017.

Confused by NB-IOT, Cat-M1, Cat-M2, LoRa and Sigfox? Looking for the decoder ring for the IoT? This Rohde & Schwarz webinar is an informative tutorial and helps to clear the fog.

Connected Car — Tesla reported a collision which caused the death of the driver, while the Tesla was "on autopilot." In a blog post, Tesla says this is the first death in 130 million driving miles, compared to a fatality every 94 million miles in the U.S. and 60 million miles worldwide.