IMS 2007 takes on a unique importance to the RF/microwave community with its location in Hawaii, halfway between Asia and the continental United States, and its expectation to draw much larger than typical attendance from the Asia Pacific region.
As I have been covering Asia for high-frequency EDA software dating back to my first visit to India in 1988, I have personally witnessed over the past two decades the many and dynamic changes that have taken place in Asia.
Early on, the majority of engineering activity in Asia in the electronics market centered on improvements to the manufacturing process of products that had been designed elsewhere. The situation has evolved dramatically in the past decade—with consumer electronics becoming increasingly popular and dominant as an overall market.
Today, Asian manufacturers are design houses as well, offering design services internationally—to North American and European customers—along with finished products.
This trend for Asia to be the consumer electronics leader first started in the digital area and is now moving into the analog and radio-frequency (RF) area.
In support of this trend, many North American companies have embraced the pool of talented engineers in Asia Pacific and have opened design centers in China and other Asian countries, or have formed partnerships with Asian companies and universities to cooperate on design centers and educational/training facilities.
In particular for AWR, IMS 2007 is valuable in several ways. Since its inception, AWR has been a global company, and we see the Asia Pacific region as an increasingly important center for electronic design and a rapidly expanding market for design software.
This activity has spawned an unprecedented demand for EDA tools. Design houses with limited resources and complex design projects want easy-to-use tools that enable them to focus on the design instead of tool support.
Along with this comes another need for software tool integration and interoperability: to migrate existing IP into different design environments, and to integrate specialized third-party tools into the design flow.
AWR’s software, with its intuitive user interface, unified design platform and specially-developed technologies for third-party tool integration, is well-suited to address the needs of the Asia Pacific market and is, in fact, being very well-received by a growing number of companies in the region.
IMS 2007 is also important to AWR because its location in Hawaii facilitates the possibility for our customers to interact with all facets of AWR’s team—from executive management, to R&D, and to sales, support and marketing. It enables us to spend additional quality time with our Asian customers with whom we may have had limited personal interaction in the past.
IMS 2007 provides the North American and Asian RF/microwave communities with a rare opportunity to interact with each other in real time, share ideas and create mutually beneficial business. For all, IMS 2007 will be a true international meeting of the minds.