Pat Hindle, MWJ Editor

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Every year Swami Hindle makes his RF and microwave industry predictions for the New Year.  Here are 8 predictions for 2017 plus perspectives from executives at ADI and MathWorks.

Here is a look at the most popular technical articles (by number of page views) for 2016. About half are cover stories but several are older, classic articles from many years ago (including #1).

Featuring most of the 5G heavyweights, IEEE GLOBECOM took place the week of Dec 5 in Washington DC featuring covering next generation communications topics. The event is one of the flagship conferences of the IEEE Communications Society and meets once a year in North America attracting more than 2000 leading scientists, researchers and industry experts.

This year was the 53rd Annual International Symposium and Convention for the Association of Old Crows (AOC) focusing on Electromagnetic Spectrum Operations and attended by international military leaders, policy makers and experts from the warfare industry. The event took place in Washington DC with the technical sessions covering research findings and increasing awareness of emerging technologies in the areas of electronic support, electronic attack, electronic protection, spectrum awareness and spectrum de-confliction.

fter the FCC’s historic vote on July 14 establishing rules for microwave and mmWave broadband operations above 6 GHz in the US, much more attention has been paid to the mmWave region. The move effectively quadruples the amount of radio bandwidth that was available before to the mobile industry. Professor Ted Rappaport was the first to show that mmWaves were viable for cellular communications with his urban channel modeling tests done many years ago. Now he has done similar tests in a rural setting showing the viability of line-of-sight and non-line-of-sight transmission of millimeter mmWave communications.

Eli Brookner is the honorary chairman of EDI CON USA 2016 and will introduce the plenary keynote, Tom Sikina, who will present on the topic of reflecting on innovation in the development of phased arrays. Innovation is a major focal point at EDI CON USA 2016, which will bring together industry leaders to discuss creative ways to address today’s engineering challenges in RF, microwave, and high-speed digital design. Eli Brookner will also give a short course on phased array radar basics and the latest advancements in the industry. We interviewed Eli about his perspectives on the industry.

NIWeek 2016 lived up to its usual high level of impactful new products and demos. The keynotes are always Apple-like with dramatic product introductions and interesting applications that have been enabled by their modular hardware and software. Of course, Dr. T kicked off the first keynote and discussed the first 40 years of NI as they celebrated their birthday this year. He discussed the evolution of modular instrumentation and NI’s vision of virtual instrumentation as today’s test and measurement equipment has become software driven. The processing power of the FPGA, driven by Moore’s Law, has increased tremendously over the years and the PXI platform has provided an open, modular platform. This has all been amplified by the NI user community and partners to grow the applications and uses of the NI platform worldwide.

EMC 2016 featured Dr. Robert Scully, NASA Johnson Space Lab, kicking off the plenary session with his light hearted talk, “EMC in 2016 and Beyond: What Is It and Why Do We Care?”. As the IEEE EMC is an international organization, they periodically hold EMC outside of the US so traveled to Ottawa, Canada this year. 

Active Electronically Steered Array (AESA) technology has been used in military systems, mostly radars, for many years. AESA systems have traditionally been too expensive for most commercial applications, but new phased array technologies are quickly enabling low cost commercial applications such as vehicle sensors, satellite communications and 5G cellular systems. These systems use beamforming techniques to more precisely deliver RF energy in concentrated beams giving more bits per Hz in the targeted area while reducing interference.