Pat Hindle, Editor, Microwave Journal

MILCOM hosted global military communications professionals involved in command, control, communications, computing, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (C4ISR) applications taking place in Baltimore this year. In the exhibition, we visited the RF and microwave companies participating and saw the following products and demos in their booths.

The oven is going under a revolutionary change in the next few years, as RF energy enters the cooking market in the form of new microwave ovens. As the technology is perfected over the next year or two, microwave ovens will be replaced with multiple source solid-state RF ovens which in turn could be introduced into the traditional gas/electric heated ovens most widely used today. It just so happens that this is the 50^th anniversary of the first commercial countertop microwave oven sold in 1967--so a good time to celebrate a new innovation, as not much has change with the microwave oven over the last 50 years.

The EDI CON USA 2017 keynote speakers addressed the latest engineering trends and challenges in our industry from “in the trenches” stories of design challenges, successes and failures from “Bet Your Job” to “5G in 5 Years” look into the future to a behind the scenes look at T&M. Below are full videos of these featured talks delivered on Sept 12 in Boston.

GLOBALFOUNDRIES had a bunch of announcements last week coinciding with their company meeting. From an RF perspective, they announced the availability of the first RF SOI foundry solution manufactured on 300 mm wafers.  According to the release, GF’s new 8SW technology offers a low cost, low power, highly flexible solution with high performance switching, low-noise amplifiers and logic processing capabilities.

The 60^th IEEE EMC SI/PI Symposium took place August 7-11 at National Harbor in Washington DC with the “plan to inspire, envision, and innovate.” The keynote set the stage for this plan as Julius Knapp, FCC Chief of the Office of Engineering and Technology, discussed the status of the FCC and industry EMC standards, the equipment authorization program and enforcement as the wireless space becomes more and more crowded with emerging technologies such as IoT, connected/autonomous vehicles, UAVs, increased satellite broadband and 5G taking off.

This is the first year that NIWeek has taken place in late May instead of its normal early August time slot and switches permanently to this part of the calendar. NIWeek 2017 kicked off with new CEO Alex Davern paying tribute to Dr. T with a standing ovation from the audience. Read this full summary of NIWeek 2017.