Pat Hindle, MWJ Editor

RSS

Fujitsu Limited and Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd. announced last week the development of the first method for bonding single-crystal diamond to a SiC substrate at room temperature. Using this technology for heat dissipation in high-power GaN HEMT devices enables stable operation at higher power levels than currently used. Application of this technology is expected to significantly enhance the performance of radars and wireless communications since they can operate at higher powers.

The Cambridge Consultants Innovation Day 2017 addressed how insightful design, smarter products and digital services are transforming business with keynote sessions and seminars given by their experts and customers. The day started off with CEO Eric Wilkinson discussing how Cambridge Consultants (CC) is investing in digital services, virtual reality, artificial intelligence and synthetic biology.

Yole Developpment just reported that between 2017 and 2022, an 8% CAGR is expected for acoustic wave filters. The market is dominated by historical players with a strong international position that has a big barrier to entry. They also reported that acoustic wave filter patenting activity was very high between 2000 and 2006 but since then, it has progressively decreasing reaching a plateau in 2010.

Early this year, T-Mobile identified 1 million square miles where the 600 MHz spectrum is available for deployment and acquired 35 MHz of contiguous uplink spectrum between 663-698 MHz and corresponding 35 MHz of downlink spectrum between 617-652 MHz. See how Qorvo and Qualcomm are meeting the demand for this band.

The oven is going under a revolutionary change in the next few years, as RF energy enters the cooking market in the form of new microwave ovens. As the technology is perfected over the next year or two, microwave ovens will be replaced with multiple source solid-state RF ovens which in turn could be introduced into the traditional gas/electric heated ovens most widely used today. It just so happens that this is the 50^th anniversary of the first commercial countertop microwave oven sold in 1967--so a good time to celebrate a new innovation, as not much has change with the microwave oven over the last 50 years.

GLOBALFOUNDRIES had a bunch of announcements last week coinciding with their company meeting. From an RF perspective, they announced the availability of the first RF SOI foundry solution manufactured on 300 mm wafers.  According to the release, GF’s new 8SW technology offers a low cost, low power, highly flexible solution with high performance switching, low-noise amplifiers and logic processing capabilities.

A year or two ago, it was thought that the first 5G applications would be sub 6 GHz using technologies such as massive MIMO, high orders of carrier aggregation, heterogeneous networks, etc., to achieve better data rates, latency and capacity. But new semiconductor processes and architectures have rapidly progressed making 5G mmWave technology available today at reasonable costs.

Airbus Defence and Space has worked with 3D Systems to achieve a major breakthrough: The first 3D printed radio frequency (RF) filter tested and validated for use in commercial telecommunications satellites as outlined in their latest case study.

We don’t talk very much about local community service and high quality company culture as a technical magazine. I was lucky enough to be invited to a Microsemi reception yesterday afternoon where they showed their commitment to the local Lawrence and Lowell community at their manufacturing facility in Lawrence, MA.

Check out these 2 panels at EDI CON USA 2017 covering High Performance GaN Technology and 5G mmWave Systems and Test.