Pat Hindle, MWJ Editor

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It is that time of year, here are my predictions for 2015:

1.  The hot areas for 2015 will be 5G, IoT and UAVs

2.  Consumer wearables will switch from fitness monitoring to health/medical monitoring

 3.  UAVs will be legalized for many commercial applications ahead of FAA schedule as safety issues become the major concern..... 

 The China International Conference & Exhibition on Microwave and Antennas (IME/China) took place October 29 to 31 at the Shanghai Everbright Convention & Exhibition Center. This is a microwave show combined with an EMC show which is the primary focus with the EMC booths up front and the microwave companies in the back.

 European Microwave Week just wrapped up in Rome last week. It was a busy event with strong attendance this year despite the awkward location of the venue which is far from the city and hotels.  Keysight, R&S and National Instruments were front and center at the exhibition along with a large presence from companies like Anritsu, CST, ANSYS, TriQuint, Macom, Maury and Cascade to name a few.  Selex Finmeccanica also had a large booth to support the show in locally in Italy. The booth traffic was strong by almost all accounts and exhibitors seemed to have good quality leads from the event. 

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.