Pat Hindle, MWJ Technical Editor
Pat Hindle is responsible for editorial content, article review and special industry reporting for Microwave Journal magazine and its web site in addition to social media and special digital projects. Prior to joining the Journal, Mr. Hindle held various technical and marketing positions throughout New England, including Marketing Communications Manager at M/A-COM (Tyco Electronics), Product/QA Manager at Alpha Industries (Skyworks), Program Manager at Raytheon and Project Manager/Quality Engineer at MIT. Mr. Hindle graduated from Northeastern University - Graduate School of Business Administration and holds a BS degree from Cornell University in Materials Science Engineering.
January 22, 2009
The Strategy Analytics (SA) has posted a new Wireless Network Strategies service report, “US Wireless Market Outlook: 2009 Key Trends,” and predicts that US cellular subscriber growth will remain strong despite the economic situation but growth levels will scale back slightly from 2008. US cellular service revenues will also continue to grow, albeit at a slower growth rate of 3.9%, down from 7.5% in 2008. This is consistent with some surveys I have heard about saying that the technology products people expect to continue to buy are cell phones and HDTVs (those products are part of our everyday life and...
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January 13, 2009
While WiMAX dominated the news over the last year or so, LTE will probably be the hot topic this year as deployments start to happen. ABI Research reports that more than eighteen operators globally have announced LTE deployment plans, and the tough economy does not seem to have dampened their enthusiasm. ABI Research estimates that operators will spend over $8.6 billion on LTE base station infrastructure alone . Verizon has announced acceleration of its LTE deployment timetable, bringing the launch forward from 2010 to 2009. Many of the others are looking at a 2011-2012 time frame , by which time,...
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January 2, 2009
As we kick off the new year, we will be posting our thoughts and related news items that discuss economic trends we see in the hope of gaining some insight into the markets that will grow this year as we try to pull out of this recession. This is certainly a time where market focus is more important than ever and targeting growth markets and any other market opportunities that arise will be a key to success. In this type of economic market, we believe that new product development and targeted marketing are two key areas to concentrate on. Strategy...
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December 19, 2008
Kansas State University engineers are helping Peregrine implement its idea of an energy-harvesting radio. This concept could be used to implement bridge structural integrity monitoring with wireless sensors since changing the batteries on hundreds of sensors on each bridge is not practical. Kansas State is developing the energy harvesting radios for Peregrine to be used in these types of applications. Peregrine's UltraCMOS process leads itself well to very low power devices and K-State engineers are looking at the design challenges of a radio system. Although the prototype captures and stores light energy with solar cells, these energy-harvesting radios could be...
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December 17, 2008
In case you did not see this news item, I just thought I had to share it since it is so appropriate for the holidays (Source: Carnegie Institution for Science): If you are still deciding on what to give the woman (or microwave engineer) who has everything this holiday season, then researchers in Washington may have solved that last minute gift problem – microwaved diamonds. Members of Carnegie Institution’s Geophysical Laboratory have used a chemical vapor deposition (CVD) method to grow synthetic diamonds for their experiments. Unlike other methods, which mimic the high pressures deep within the earth where natural...
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December 8, 2008
We receive several technical articles each month about circuits that utilize Defected Ground Structures (DGS) to improve performance. A DGS is where the ground plane metal is purposely modified with a certain geometry (and positioning of that geometry) to enhance performance. They can be used in various circuits with antennas, filters, delay lines, phase shifters, etc. to improve performance such as modifying the band pass/reject characteristics for filters or modifying the slow wave effect for delay lines or phase shifters. While DGS may improve performance, these circuits are highly susceptible to the effects of the packaging since they radiate. Any...
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December 1, 2008
The Auto show is coming to Boston this week, so I am excited to make my annual visit to this event. We get a group together each year and spend several hours salivating over the new cars (especially the exotics) and then have a nice Italian dinner in the north end. Every year I look for more RF and microwave products in cars but hope the severe down turn in the industry does not effect what we will see too much (I am not counting on getting any giveaways this year). RFID is available on the new Ford F150...
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November 24, 2008
There have been several market research reports out over the last month that show what I think is a permanent shift in cell phone leaders. Samsung took over as leading mobile phone shipments in the US market (Apple moved up to #6). RIM seems to be holding strong and introducing some nice products. It seems like the global market leaders of Nokia and Motorola are loosing some of their grip on some of the market. The iPhone also took over as the best selling phone which had been held for a couple of years by the outdated Razor. The smart...
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November 19, 2008
I attended the AMTA Conference this week in Boston at the Park Plaza hotel including the keynote speech by Dr. Eric D. Evans (Director of MIT Lincoln Labs) about radar measurement activities within their organization. I was surprised at the wide array of RF/microwave projects they are working on. He said they are concentrating on key technology enablers such as digital sensors, portable software, open system architectures, sensor/network sidecars and online processors. He said they are still innovating in hardware but spend more effort these days on software. They use rapid proto-typing (3 months from inception to hardware) and...
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November 13, 2008
Microwave technology currently has relatively limited uses in medical applications such as MRI and Telemetry systems with RFID starting to find some uses, but I can think of many others. However, there seems to be a resurgence in some new medical research activities that could change that. Our Dec. issue feature story will describe research being done by Duke University to use microwaves to mildly heat tumors so they respond better to other treatments. New modeling software has enabled better results to eliminate hot spots so that this technique shows promise now. And now UMass has just released news that...
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