Articles by David Vye

Our first week of EuMW 2008 pre-show coverage is wrapping up and a number of the MWJ staff are on their way to Amsterdam to get ready for the big conference and exhibition. I will head out Saturday night in order to catch one day of sight-seeing before heading over to the RAI (venue site) to help set up our media center and MWJ booth. This year our booth will be spotlighting the latest updates to our Microwave Journal China Web site . This is a pre-view to the site which will be officially launched in the new year....

EuMW 2008 offers attendees the opportunity to attend workshops and seminars sponsored (and presented) by participating exhibitors. Apart from the product demos available on the exhibition show floor or the technical conference, these workshops give engineers a chance to hear directly from commercial vendors about the latest solutions to today's engineering challenges. The companies offering workshops this year all belong to the test and measurement equipment manufacturer or simulation software provider sectors. These are two areas that greatly influence design and where product complexity makes ongoing training/education somewhat of a necessity. Among the workshop sponsors, companies include: Agilent Technologies, Ansoft,...

Last Friday (October 10th ) I had the pleasure of attending the COMSOL Conference 2008 Boston at the Renaissance Boston Waterfront Hotel. This venue is very close to the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center (BCEC) where MTT-S IMS 2009 will be held, so it gave me an opportunity to preview this up and coming section of Boston down by the waterfront while catching up with the engineers and scientists using this advanced software. Comsol puts on a very impressive workshop each year with a crowd of engineers, physicists, chemists, students and scientists numbering in the hundreds. With Multiphysics software,...

Feeling down about recent news? The following items should cheer you up or at least make you consider life goes on. While financial news continued to dominate the headlines it was nice to see the majority of press releases from companies in the RF/microwave space tended back to the tangibles – good old (well, actually new) fashioned hardware! Plenty of new products with impressive performance and less complexity than a credit default swap (whatever that is). Not to mention new business wins and other impressive milestones met. Skyworks announced that the company had roughly doubled its year-over-year Smart Phone FEM...

In a previous life, I spent some time developing homegrown software programs to perform various RF tests (power measurements, load-pull, IMD, etc.) and so I have a soft spot in my heart for automated test systems. Therefore, news of an intermodulation distortion (IMD) application for Agilent's PNA-X microwave network analyzer caught my eye. Anyone who has made this measurement knows you need to drive your device (one with non-linear behavior, thus the distortion) with two signal sources (slightly seperate frequencies) and test equipment to measure the output signals (the two input signals plus the generated intermod tones), usually a spectrum...

WiMAX World 2008 was held once again this year at Chicago’s McCormick Place Conference Center from September 29 through October 1st. The event brought together businesses engaged in the development of 4G networks, including component and equipment manufacturers, service providers, content and application developers, and the financial investment community. The underlying goal of the conference was for these diverse yet inter-related entities to engage each other with regard to opportunities and barriers for WiMAX technologies. Since 2004, WiMAX World has grown from 700 attendees and 14 sponsors to over 8,000 attendees and more than 250 sponsors in 2008, slightly...

Microchip and ON Semiconductor launched a $2.3 billion offer to buy Atmel for $5 dollars a share. The two Arizona-based companies would break up Atmel, selling its nonvolatile memory and RF and automotive business to ON Semi and possibly disposing of Atmel's ASIC business if the proposed acquisition goes through. Shares of Microchip fell nearly 5%, while On Semiconductor shares were down 14.7% on the news. The current global financial situation appears to be having an impact on the microwave job market as Sony Ericsson announced the cutting of 2,000 jobs. Meanwhile, IC Insights released its 2008 forecast update, stating...

Getting an early jump on the news coming out of WiMAX World conference in Chicago occurring September 29 through October 3rd, picoChip on Monday announced that Redline Communications, a leading provider of standards-based WiMAX access and broadband wireless infrastructure products, has selected their PC8532 modem to power its next generation RedMAX 4C™ Mobile WiMAX basestations. picoChip is a leading supplier of high-performance multi-core DSP, offering a powerful platform to develop products for emerging global wireless communications markets such as WiMAX, WCDMA, LTE, TD-SCDMA and 4G. picoChip’s products scale from femtocell access points and picocells to sophisticated multi-sector carrier macrocells. The...

The 4G Executive Summit at the WiMAX World 2008 Conference and Expo was a full day event, hosted by Berge Ayvazian, the Chief strategy Officer with the Yankee Group. The event included a keynote speech by Hank Kafka, the VP of Architecture for AT&T on “Operator Strategies for 4G Networks” as well as a talk by Charlie Martin, Wireless Chief Technology Officier for Huawei Technologies (USA) followed by a 4G executive roundtable, networking lunch and four afternoon sessions on infrastructure strategies, 4G Device and CPE strategies, regulatory and spectrum policy; and 4G applications workshop. In all the program was designed...

On Wednesday of this week, Agilent Technologies and The MathWorks announced the availability of MATLAB with the purchase of Agilent's EXA, MXA, or PSA signal analyzers. Hmmmmm.... what does this mean? Are they giving away a seat of MATLAB with the purchase of one of these high-performance analyzers? Well, no . One has to read this press release very closely to figure out what is being offered. Agilent and The MathWorks are making MATLAB available as a purchase option when buying one of these signal analyzers. I don't know how difficult it was to purchase MATLAB in the past, but...