I saw the following items last week that I think are worth sharing. After IMS, when the flow of new product announcements becomes a trickle, we have some time to think about the big picture. This was one of those weeks.

Companies and Products

Analog Devices (ADI) announced a new executive team reflecting the acquisition of Linear Technology. Greg Henderson, who headed the RF/microwave group at ADI, was promoted to senior VP with responsibility for the automotive, communications and aerospace and defense businesses of the combined company. Rick Hess, who held that role, is now a strategic advisor to CEO Vince Roche, responsible for guiding the integration of Linear Technology into ADI. Both Henderson and Hess came to ADI through the Hittite acquisition and both spent formative years at M/A‑COM.

ADI held a briefing for investors last week, and Greg Henderson articulated the company’s RF/microwave strategy. Read his presentation slides here.

GenXComm a startup whose roots are at the University of Texas Austin, secured seed funding to pursue its vision of full duplex technology. While the details about its S-SIX technology are sparse, GenXComm cites lab and field data: first demonstrating full duplex over a 20 MHz band at 2.4 GHz with 100 Mbps each way (i.e., total throughput of 200 Mbps), then demonstrating a 100 MHz full duplex link at 24 GHz, achieving 1 Gbps.

In case you missed it, as I did while attending the IMS conference, Keysight reported fiscal Q2 revenue of $758 million, which was up 3 percent from the prior year’s quarter. Their commercial communications segment was flat at $256 million; 5G and data center demand were strong, offsetting weak 4G demand. The aerospace and defense segment fell 11 percent from the prior year, to $168 million, caused by congressional delays approving the DoD budget.

NXP announced a 750 W LDMOS transistor for ISM and other applications falling within the 700 to 1300 MHz frequency range. At 915 MHz, the MRF13750H delivers 750 W CW with 67 percent efficiency.

NYU WIRELESS received $2.3 million from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to develop a millimeter wave platform for emergency communications systems. NYU's team will apply millimeter wave technology to public safety communications, researching propagation behavior and developing channel models. The University of Padova (Università degli Studi di Padova) and the Austin Fire Department are partnering with NYU WIRELESS in the study.

Raytheon’s AESAs on fighter aircraft have accumulated over 1 million flight hours, a total aggregated from two U.S. services and four international customers. Raytheon delivered the 1,000th production fighter AESA in May.

WIN Semiconductors added a GaAs PIN diode MMIC process to its foundry portfolio. The 3 µm i-layer PIN diodes have near constant junction capacitance through 50 GHz, low insertion loss and high isolation. The process uses low dielectric constant crossovers and three interconnect metal layers with up to 7 µm thick Au metallization for high Q passive elements. Through-wafer vias enable ground connections, and optional RF “hot vias” support placement of RF ports on the backside of the MMIC.

Markets and Technology

Cellular/5G — AT&T announced it has deployed 256-QAM, 4x4 MIMO base stations “in a significant part of our network” and is “actively testing” four carrier aggregation. AT&T expects to see devices that can take advantage of this enhanced infrastructure “in the near future.”

Nokia Bell Labs demonstrated that 10G passive optical networks (PON) can provide the sub-millisecond latency needed for centralized radio access networks (C-RAN). This will enable carriers to use existing gigabit PON networks that have been installed for broadband fiber to the home (FTTH) or fiber to the building (FTTB) networks, accelerating the move to densify cellular base stations.

Telecom TV covered the recent 5G World conference in London and produced three videos to convey the highlights. You’ll find them here, here and here.

IoT — Mobile operator Orange has defined a dual standard IoT strategy for its French network: LoRa for low power applications and LTE-M for higher data rate requirements. Orange will add LTE-M capability to its 4G network. Their LoRa service is well underway, with a network that covers some 4,000 towns in France and nationwide coverage planned by the end of the year.

Defense — The latest U.S. missile defense test failed, as the SM-3 interceptor missed the ballistic missile target that was launched from Hawaii. The SM-3 used in the test was a new developmental version. Vice Admiral Jim Syring, the director of the Missile Defense Agency, told Congress that the U.S. capability is “not there yet.”

Technology and Society — The White House hosted meetings with tech executives last week. The president opened the meeting saying, “Our goal is to lead a sweeping transformation of the federal government’s technology that will deliver dramatically better services for citizens.” Axios wrote a summary of the seven who came and their respective interests. How much should we read into the facial expressions in the group photo?

China and the U.S. are competing to develop the fastest supercomputer, one that can perform 10¹⁸ floating-point operations per second, which is called an exaflop. The latest supercomputer rankings give China the fastest machine at 93 x 10¹² flops or 93 teraflops.

Is Amazon's proposed acquisition of Whole Foods a sign that the technology titans — Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google — are taking over America? The Wall Street Journal’s Christopher Mims offers his opinion.

“People keep saying, what happens to jobs in the era of automation? I think there will be more jobs, not fewer.” Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Alphabet, expressed his view at the Viva Tech conference in Paris. He referred to a just-released study by McKinsey that suggests 90 percent of jobs are not fully automatable. “Fully” is an important word, as it will likely determine job satisfaction.

Last Word — Amidst all this technological change, are you lagging, feeling like you’re failing to adapt? Most of us are and may feel that we'll never catch up. G. Pascal Zachary, a professor of practice at Arizona State University’s School for the Future of Innovation in Society, shares his experience and feelings in When Innovation Moves Too Fast.

Are you lagging? Worried about AI? Other thoughts? Leave a comment below.