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NI is making major investments in 6G research - see how they are going it.

Qorvo® announced last week that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has granted emergency use authorization for the Qorvo Omnia™ SARS-CoV-2 Antigen Test and that it was awarded a $24.4 million contract with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) through the Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics initiative. Learn about this new technology.

In Part 1 of the 2-part blog series “5G in 2021 & The Rise of the Machines”, a high-level discussion of the wireless connectivity trends is provided, along with a glimpse into how wireless standard convergence is a likely outcome to the drive toward unbridled wireless connectivity. This blog will close the loop and finish the discussion of these trends, with highlights on the progress and potential impact of the Industrial Internet-of-Things (IIoT), vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications, connecting everything else, and how we can seize the opportunity of a new paradigm of connectivity.

5G has been heralded not only as a new frontier of cellular telecommunications, but an enabling technology for a new paradigm of interconnectivity and intelligence in devices deployed throughout the world. Advances in smart manufacturing, cities, transportation, and our homes, is part of an overhaul that will further enhance, automate, and generally “augment” people’s lives and our interactions with the machine realm.

As mmWave bandwidths become more commonly used, multilayer PCBs containing mmWave circuitry will also become more common, designed with greater numbers of layers for smaller places. With the right choices of circuit materials and prepregs, everything will hold together.

MWC Shanghai 2021 took place this week using a Hybrid event format so was the first in-person trade show for the industry this year. They expected about 200 exhibitors and about 20,000 visitors, about a third or the normal amount, so it will be interesting to see the actual counts when they are reported.

Though Digital beamforming offers unique advantages in real-time reduction in co-channel interference and delivering multiple beams, the heightened complexity of the digital beamforming payload poses many real challenges and even disadvantages for some applications compared to phased-array antenna systems. Read this to learn more.

Over the decades, the RAN has been subject to ongoing technological progression (to improve the quality of service, raise data rates, support new applications, etc.) through enhancements being made at regular intervals. The majority of these have (relatively speaking at least) been fairly subtle. Looking ahead, these kind of incremental alterations are no longer going to be enough. What is called for, instead, is dramatic and decisive disruption of the RAN at its very foundations.

The emergence and rapid development of active antenna systems for terrestrial communications has also spurred development of highly integrated and capable digital beamforming (DBF) solutions for satellite applications. Read about this new development.