While it may seem premature to be talking about a June event in the first week of March, one glorious aspect of print from an advertiser’s perspective is our magazine's hang time and the depth of the editorial so far this year will ensure that engineers take their time absorbing each issue. As a result, your messaging will have more time to be absorbed prior to IMS. This is the advantage of print and why our show issue is published a month in advance. A benefit that also fairs well for February, March and April. So let’s take a look at what’s coming in April and beyond.
April: Amplifiers and Oscillators are the theme of this issue and we have both topics covered from the design, applications, measurement and product perspectives. Our cover story is on the state of power amplifiers at millimeter-wave frequency used in the Microwave Backhaul infrastructure currently being deployed. Liam Devlin of Plextek takes a look at this evolving technology and the markets that are driving e-band MMIC power amplifier innovation.
We will feature technical articles on power management from RFMD and power linearization from Peregrine, both related to RFICs for mobile device front-ends. Scintera writes about a PA linearization technique using analog pre-distortion, Anaren improves a Doherty PA performance, size and cost with their new Xinger combiner and two amplifier design papers focus on a tunable inter-stage matching network and fast transimpedance gain and noise current density calculations. For the oscillator design crowd, we are featuring a production phase noise measurement system from Holzworth and a phase noise reduction technique from Agilent Technologies. Amplifiers and Oscillators are central to all RF systems, so it is no wonder that these topics have broad appeal to our readers.
May: While Carl Sheffres will discuss the special value-added marketing programs we have in store for May advertisers, I’d like to talk about what our readers can expect. The editorial staff is well into planning the annual IEEE MTT-S IMS Show issue and this year we’ve come up with a number of new and exciting editorial items and marketing opportunities to feature alongside some old favorites. Similar to past years, we will take a close look at the regional microwave industry indigenous to Baltimore and the Mid-Atlantic States. In particular, we will feature an article about the local filter “family tree” with guest contributions from the people who established this area as a hotbed of filter technology. We will expand our conference coverage featuring messages from the three conference chairs (IMS, RIFC and ARFTG) with a look at how these conferences reflect upon the industry as a whole. Joining the the symposium chairs will be guest authors sharing three perspectives from industry, including a view from Test Instruments, RF Semiconductors and aerospace/defense systems.
We will also look at special IMS events such as the MicroApps session and the Women in Microwave Engineering gathering as well as a “graphic novel” of MTT-Stories. Some of these editorial will involve a social media component for readers and advertisers to participate in, but I'll leave the details as a surprise. We know IMS is the time for many of you to release new products, and so Staff Editor Jenn DiMarco has sent out a reminder to our promo list that you can begin submitting your new product information as soon as it is available.
June: This is our RFIC/MMIC/Semiconductor issue. We will feature a special case study on one of today’s leading RF semiconductor design teams as well as an update from the IBM foundry on their latest RF Silicon technology and future trends. The backlog of technical and product features extend well into June and July, but I’ll provide more details in next month’s WaveGuide newsletter.