I recently attended the International Microwave Symposium (IMS) in Philadelphia. As mentioned in our wrap up, while the theme of IMS2018 was Microwaves, Medicine and Mobility, the real theme was 5G, 5G and 5G. Most companies in the exhibition were highlighting their play in the 5G market and with the one day 5G Summit, there were many talks addressing 5G applications and technologies.

IMS 2018 included 4 conferences, 600+ exhibitors, 75 technical sessions, and about 840 presentations over 6 days. More than 885 papers were submitted and 425 were accepted and total attendance was estimated to exceed 9,000. There were papers from 45 countries, with 70% from outside the USA. This year’s IMS included two new events, a panel of physicians and the IMBioC opening session that was held jointly with the IMS closing session.  

Many companies introduced new products during the week of the exhibition so there are too many to cover here but our show summary has a large number of them listed. There were two unique new concepts that caught my attention though. Synergy Microwave was demonstrating an electro-optical oscillator based synthesizer that generates frequencies up to 30 GHz with both low phase noise close in and far out from the carrier. As an example, X-band performance is -110.0 dBc/Hz at 1 kHz offset and -136.5 dBc/Hz at 10 kHz offset. K-Band phase noise performance is -102 dBc/Hz for 1 kHz offset and -127 dBc/Hz at 10 kHz offset.

Another interesting product was from AMCAD who was featuring IQSTAR, an advanced measurement software developed for efficient and accurate RF and Microwave Circuit Test Flow. It allows verification, analysis and RF Circuit tuning (LNA, MPA, HPA, Filters) using your existing equipment no matter kind you have.  IQSTAR does not require any programming skills and offers the flexibility of turnkey professional measurement software. It creates a virtual datasheet where customers can drill down into the detailed measured data for a complete data set of the actual device performance.