Pat Hindle, MWJ Editor

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fter the FCC’s historic vote on July 14 establishing rules for microwave and mmWave broadband operations above 6 GHz in the US, much more attention has been paid to the mmWave region. The move effectively quadruples the amount of radio bandwidth that was available before to the mobile industry. Professor Ted Rappaport was the first to show that mmWaves were viable for cellular communications with his urban channel modeling tests done many years ago. Now he has done similar tests in a rural setting showing the viability of line-of-sight and non-line-of-sight transmission of millimeter mmWave communications.

Eli Brookner is the honorary chairman of EDI CON USA 2016 and will introduce the plenary keynote, Tom Sikina, who will present on the topic of reflecting on innovation in the development of phased arrays. Innovation is a major focal point at EDI CON USA 2016, which will bring together industry leaders to discuss creative ways to address today’s engineering challenges in RF, microwave, and high-speed digital design. Eli Brookner will also give a short course on phased array radar basics and the latest advancements in the industry. We interviewed Eli about his perspectives on the industry.

NIWeek 2016 lived up to its usual high level of impactful new products and demos. The keynotes are always Apple-like with dramatic product introductions and interesting applications that have been enabled by their modular hardware and software. Of course, Dr. T kicked off the first keynote and discussed the first 40 years of NI as they celebrated their birthday this year. He discussed the evolution of modular instrumentation and NI’s vision of virtual instrumentation as today’s test and measurement equipment has become software driven. The processing power of the FPGA, driven by Moore’s Law, has increased tremendously over the years and the PXI platform has provided an open, modular platform. This has all been amplified by the NI user community and partners to grow the applications and uses of the NI platform worldwide.

EMC 2016 featured Dr. Robert Scully, NASA Johnson Space Lab, kicking off the plenary session with his light hearted talk, “EMC in 2016 and Beyond: What Is It and Why Do We Care?”. As the IEEE EMC is an international organization, they periodically hold EMC outside of the US so traveled to Ottawa, Canada this year. 

Active Electronically Steered Array (AESA) technology has been used in military systems, mostly radars, for many years. AESA systems have traditionally been too expensive for most commercial applications, but new phased array technologies are quickly enabling low cost commercial applications such as vehicle sensors, satellite communications and 5G cellular systems. These systems use beamforming techniques to more precisely deliver RF energy in concentrated beams giving more bits per Hz in the targeted area while reducing interference.

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler laid out his proposal for 5G spectrum allocation that he hopes will be approved by Congress on July 14. It is a comprehensive plan to designate spectrum in the low frequency bands, develop more mid-band frequencies in the crowed areas currently used and a gives specific focus to high frequency bands in the mmWave range. He stated that we will be the first in the world to approve these types of measures if Congress gives their approval next month. 

Lockheed Martin recently released new information about their Space Fence which caught my attention since they are using GaN amplifiers in the system. Space Fence is a long range radar system to track and monitor objects and debris in orbit around the Earth. They announced that objects in space will soon be monitored by a radar array for the U.S. Air Force’s Space Fence as part of Lockheed Martin’s new test site.

Electromagnetic radiation – it might sound like something that you’d be better off avoiding, but electromagnetic waves of various kinds underpin our senses and how we interact with the world – from the light emissions through which your eyes perceive these words, to the microwaves that carry the Wi-Fi signal to your laptop or phone on which you’re reading it.

It was fun meeting Chiphead for the first time at DesignCon 2016. The event covers areas such as PCB design tools, power and signal integrity, jitter and crosstalk, high-speed serial design, test and measurement tools, parallel and memory interface design, ICs, semiconductor components and more. The test/measurement, software and connector companies dominate the exhibition. As the speed of digital electronics has increased, the techniques and methods for digital and RF/microwave design have converged so it was interesting to see the similarities between the two worlds.

Swami Hindle makes his annual RF/Microwave Industry predictions for 2016. Read the future and share your thoughts.