Pat Hindle, MWJ Editor

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As merger mania has hit the RF industry, we head into the fall season and back to school.   We had a slow end of the summer for webinars and trade shows but Sept kicks off with Autotest and Super Mobility Week plus we have a bunch of webinars coming up on a variety of topics. On the editorial side we have the following upcoming articles and themes.

 The RF industry has had an unprecedented number of larger mergers this year.  I believe it is a sign the wireless is maturing and bigger companies with scale are needed to drive down costs to mainstream our technology.  It started early this year when Macom acquired Nitronex and then kicked into high gear in early summer with the mergers of RFMD and TriQuint, Cobham and Aeroflex, and ADI and Hittite. These announcements made big waves in the industry but it was not over.  Now Murata, an $8.4 billion wireless giant, has announced it is acquiring Peregrine. 

Although I have heard a lot about NIWeek in previous years, this was my first time attending the event. It was like a mini-IMS but with a lot of fun displays and demos ranging from robots to UAVs to rockets. The science enabled by NI hardware and software is amazing and this conference attracts a huge community of thousands of engineers and scientists from around the world. Read my review of the event including links to photos and videos.

 Join industry and research leaders from around the world to discuss the future of RF and wireless design and test at NIWeek Aug 4-7 in Austin, TX. Topics include wireless technologies, 5G communications technologies, advanced testing techniques, trends in microwave design, RF characterization, high volume test, and wireless communications design. 

 In the first half of the year, MACOM has acquired Nitronex, Avago has acquired LSI, RFMD and TriQuint are merging, Cobham is acquiring Aeroflex, and most recently announced, Analog Devices is acquiring Hittite. My head is spinning with all of this consolidation, not to mention several other smaller acquisitions that happened during this period.  What is going on in the RF industry?  An industry that has been mostly made up of smaller to medium sized companies seems to be going large with all of these organizations turning into multi-billion dollar companies. 

As IMS 2014 in Tampa wraps up, the powering the waves theme was very present starting with the kickoff reception party on Monday featuring a water skiing show staring general chair Larry Dunleavy. Larry and his team did an excellent job of running the event and the Tampa Convention center is a nice venue with close proximity to the session rooms and exhibition (not to mention it is right on the water with a great view).

The AUVSI unmanned systems show seems to grow each year and reached about 6500 attendees and 600 exhibitors this year in Orlando, FL. While the show has traditionally been dominated by military unmanned vehicles, this year marked a significant growth in companies and organizations offering unmanned vehicles for civilian use. With the wind down of US operations in the Middle East, the demand for unmanned military vehicles has been greatly reduced. The US currently does not allow for commercial use of UAS but the FAA plans to develop guidelines in 2015 or 2016. The FAA is choosing 6 test sites that will evaluate technologies to determine the best use cases and rules that need to be implemented. Most of the growth in UAS is expected to come from civilian applications such as public safety, agriculture, search & rescue and wildlife management.

What is 5G? – that is what the Brooklyn 5G Summit is trying to answer by bringing together many of the leading companies and researchers in the wireless communications industry to share their latest research results and thoughts on the subject. From the semiconductor level (like Intel, Qualcomm and UC San Diego) to channel modeling (like NYU WIRELESS, University of Bristol, Nokia and Ericsson) to network providers (like China Mobile and AT&T), the whole mobile communications ecosystem was covered at this first time event.