Microwave engineers appreciate the need for different communication schemes to serve diverse channels and receivers. How information is transmitted directly impacts successful reception. In publishing today, print and the Internet are used to communicate to an intended audience. Where print is tried and true, the Journal’s website is constantly evolving to help our audience connect to content from editors, contributing authors and advertisers. To do so, we have introduced more articles online for reading, webinars and video for viewing, and blogs (expert and editors) for dialog. With this increase in content and different formats, it is important for our site visitors to have all this information well organized and accessible. It is with this goal in mind that we are pleased to unveil the new MWJ Resources section.
Most of our magazine readers, newsletter recipients and website visitors are familiar with our efforts to deliver more meaningful content through electronic means. Our Executive Interview series provides the industry with insight into how company decision makers view their respective technology, business climate and market opportunities. The Expert Advice column offers practical information and thought-provoking opinions from an invited industry guru. The Expert Advice column begins the technical discussion. Readers consume the information and can further the discussion if they so choose. Webinars, in these days of restricted travel, are definitely growing in popularity and the Q&A sessions that follow the presentation represent lively, real-time feedback. Finally, the Journal strives to be the source for technical articles and reference materials. This material is now assembled in our new Technical Library. These four elements—Webinars, Technical Library, Expert Advice and Executive Interviews—are the pillars of our re-designed Resources section.
The Executive Interview Series began in September 2007 with dual interviews between Microwave Journal and Agilent EEsof’s Todd Cutler and AWR’s Sherry Hess. Both EDA companies had new Product Feature stories in that month’s magazine and we took the opportunity to ask each executive what the new product features meant for their customers and how their business was shaping up. Since then we have had one (and sometimes two) interview(s) per month with executives from leading microwave companies in the US and Europe. We have heard from semiconductor and integrated device manufacturers such as TriQuint’s Brian Balut, Chuck Fox of Jazz Semiconductor, RFMD’s Bob Van Buskirk, Rick Montgomery of Mimix Broadband, Rodd Novak of Peregrine Semiconductor and Bryan Ingram of Avago Technologies. In August and September of this past year we had back to back interviews from RF module developers, Endwave and Narda. We have presented viewpoints from the test and measurement world (Michael Vohrer of Rohde & Schwarz, Bryan Sayler of ETS-Lindgren and Greg Maury of Maury Microwave Corp.) as well as the simulation world (Bernhard Wagner of CST and Peter Krauss of Mician GmbH).
The Executive Interview Series is among our most widely read online articles each month and we continue to get lots of positive feedback from our readers. Archiving these interviews in the new Resources section should inspire readers to go back and take another look at what was presented, consider how well the responses stood up to the test of time and compare the view of the industry from different sectors.
The Expert Advice column was started after the retirement of MWJ editor Harlan Howe and his popular online feature “Ask Harlan”. Test and measurement is a big topic of discussion among our experts. We have heard from test gurus such as Joel Dunsmore of Agilent Technologies on the expansion of network analyzers beyond S-parameters, Vince Rodriguez of ETS-Lindgren on antenna measurements, Darren McCarthy of Tektronix on measuring noise, Mark Elo from Keithley Instruments on the challenges of MIMO characterization and Larry Dunleavy on device modeling (one of the end products of microwave measurements). Design software has been the subject of discussion with input from Rob Lefebvre from Agilent and Joel Kirschman of AWR. Both Rob and Joel discussed design flows and the user-software interface; both considered what new features in EDA would address engineering productivity. Meanwhile, Jeremy Raines, an independent consultant, proposed an alternative to sophisticated EM simulation when it comes to antenna design.
Several of our experts, including Dan Nehring of Valpey Fisher, Ray Crampton of Nitronex, Rafi Hershtig of K&L Microwave and Robert Aigner of Tektonix explained the technical nuances of various microwave devices including oscillator phase noise, working with GaN, bandpass/band-stop diplexers and BAW filters, respectively. Two of our experts, Pierre Piel of Freescale and Moray Rumney of Agilent, looked at the system requirements for the medical microwave industry and emerging cellular wireless industry (such as LTE), respectively, in back to back columns last year. We present these past columns chronologically in our new Expert Advice archive for your review. The “comment” capability of the latest Expert blog has also been enhanced for more of your feedback.
Webinars
Sample of one of our live, free webinars.
Webinars are the future and the future is now. The new Resources section lets visitors preview what is coming up and what has already been presented, “on demand” and from the comfort of your home or office. Since 2007, the Journal has teamed up with Besser Associates to present free monthly webinars on topics ranging from basic microwave principles such as impedance matching and using the Smith Chart to more advanced topics such as MIMO and LTE. We have also moderated webinars from leading companies such as Freescale, TriQuint and M/A-COM. This month MWJ will host custom webinars from TriQuint and Tektronix and in the near future look for webinars from additional software vendors, test equipment manufacturers, RFIC/MMIC providers and more.
Nothing may be more important for working professionals than access to technical information. In addition to our regular monthly content, the Microwave Journal website has been featuring “web exclusives” consisting of technical articles, tutorials, application notes and the so-called white paper. The term “white paper” arose over the past few decades in England to distinguish short government reports from longer, more detailed ones that were bound in blue covers and referred to as “blue books”. Today, many engineering organizations provide detailed technical information in the form of a white paper. In information technology, a white paper is often a paper written by a lead product designer to explain the philosophy and operation of a product in a marketplace or technology context. Our new Technical Library houses all the web exclusives including white papers that have appeared on our site over the past several years. Papers are organized by topic (i.e., amplifiers, antennas, filters, packaging, etc.) for easy access and can be downloaded in PDF format for your own use, free of charge.
The Resources section also hosts design tools from various vendors and will eventually be home to more multi-media and interactive web capabilities as we add future functionality. You are busy working on the next generation of communication and so are we. We hope you enjoy it.
