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V.J. Wilson anxiously awaits the return of his prototype of a factory automation wireless link. He has thoroughly — he believes — analyzed his entire design. With a carefully crafted spreadsheet, he defined a system architecture and passed specifications on to the circuit designers. The design team completed block...

How much automation are current electronic design automation (EDA) tools providing? While the RF computer aided engineering (CAE) industry has a lot to offer in the way of automated circuit and system analysis, what about automated circuit synthesis? The circuit design project that starts with one of the typical...

The development of short-range wireless systems has captured the industry’s imagination for several decades. 1 Many of these systems operate at the internationally available unlicensed industrial, scientific and medical (ISM) 2.4 GHz frequency band. The attraction of these systems is that they can offer low cost, small physical size...

There is a requirement for low profile and lightweight antennas for microwave communications equipment. According to these requirements a microstrip antenna is best suited. Microstrip antennas have a conformal structure, are low cost and easy to integrate with solid-state devices, as well as low profile and lightweight. However, microstrip...

There has been a dramatic increase in the worldwide use of radio frequency (RF) technologies in the last two decades, especially in personal communications. In fact, since the introduction of commercial systems in 1983, cellular telephone service has been one of the fastest growing segments of the US telecommunications...

Radio-frequency (RF) circuit design has become more complicated as today’s products and technologies have evolved, while at the same time the required design cycle times have been reduced. This presents problems for designers using traditional RF and microwave design techniques, which utilize similar procedures whether done with simulation software...

Mobile telecommunication devices continue to add functionality and complexity particularly in regards to the trend of integrating more wireless bands such as GSM, E-GSM, CDMA, W-CDMA, DCS and PCS. This trend has increased the complexity of the transmit/receive and diversity antenna switch components resulting in a migration away from...

Traditionally products operating at millimeter-wave (mm-wave) frequencies could only be fabricated using waveguide technology, which restricted their application to low volume scientific applications such as radiometers and plasma diagnostics. Waveguide components suffer the disadvantages of high manufacturing complexity, large volume and high cost when dimensions become small at frequencies...

Global Communication Technology Corp. (GCT), the Taiwan-based GaAs MMIC foundry service provider, will merge with one of its major competitors, WIN Semiconductors Corp. (WIN). The shareholders meetings of the two companies met separately to approve the definitive merger agreement and confirm an equity swap at a 1:1.6 ratio (1.6...

Industry News Smiths Group announced the acquisition of TRAK Communications Inc. for $111.5 M (GBP 63m) from Veritas of New York. TRAK will form part of Smiths Interconnect, a supplier of application specific electronics for military and commercial markets. The acquisition is the fifth Smiths has announced since presenting...