Articles by David Vye

The New York Office for Technology said last Thursday that it has terminated a contract with M/A-Com Inc., a Massachusetts company that was tasked with building and leasing a wireless network worth $2 billion. This was the largest contract ever awarded by this office and the cancellation will severely hamper progress toward a goal of building a statewide wireless emergency network. The contract was canceled as the state tries to resolve a combined, record-high deficit of $15.4 billion over the next 15 months. The state warned M/A-Com in August 2008 that it was in default of its contract because internal...

On 14 January 2009, Nortel Networks filed for creditor protection in Canada and the US, with Nortel UK entering administration separately under a filing managed by Ernst & Young. The company reached this point after multiple management regimes failed in their attempts to remake the company after the bursting of the telecoms bubble. Nortel’s move may result in a more balanced industry structure for communications equipment. There is no immediate industry impact from this filing, as Nortel’s downwards spiral has been gradual and bankruptcy restructurings take time. For Nortel’s three key constituencies – customers, investors, and staff – the announcement...

Last October at the European Microwave Week in Amsterdam, I met with a number of RF/mW component manufacturers and frequently got onto the subject of the financial crises that had been unfolding for several months. At the time, the economic downturn still seemed confined to the housing and finance markets and had not yet impacted our industry. Apparently the recession had started the previous December, but those keeping count must wait a few quarters before declaring that a recession is actually in effect. While most everyone I spoke with was concerned about what was happening, the immediate future looked stable...

Samsung Electronics has announced that they will be developing their own baseband silicon ICs for both for both LTE and mobile WiMAX networks as well as media accelerators. The effort is geared toward to lowering the costs of its handsets and reducing their exposure to IPR royalties, according to Young Cho Chi, senior VP of strategic planning for Samsung's telecom division. The company historically relied on chips from Qualcomm but began diversifying its suppliers last year by moving to Broadcom and Infineon chips which use a software stack from Comneon, a joint venture between Infineon and InterDigital Communications that reportedly...

Some of the industry news that reflects the current economic climate in the first week of the New Year has been surprisingly upbeat. The analysts have been busy forecasting and several of the predictions are better than we expected, given the non-industry related news we keep hearing about. Last month, West Technology Research Solutions (WTRS), a California based research, publishing and consulting company predicted that WiMAX adoption would be strong despite economic turmoil. Analysts feel that consumer demand for entertainment and communication as well as governmental regulatory and economic incentives would push the US broadband market forward over the next...

Below are the top ten most read News items on the Microwave Journal Website. These were stand alone news postings from our "Industry News". Other widely read news items were compiled in our "Around the Circuit" feature. Judging from the top-ten list, readers were very interested in the outcome of the M/A-COM acquisition by Cobham (stayed tuned for special coverage on these two companies in February) as well as the acquisition of Ansoft by Ansys. News from test & Measurement companies Agilent and Tektronix made the list as did two news items from TriQuint on their high power GaN transistors....

Though a tad early, we thought we would get a jump on sharing our top-ten list of web-published articles for 2008. Scanning through statistics in our web site’s back office gives us a pretty good glimpse of which articles were most read by you. Without accounting for when the article was published (articles published earlier in the year have a definite time advantage), the ten most read technical articles were: 1. Now: Phased-array Radars: Past, Astounding Breakthroughs and Future Trends by E. Brookner was very popular the moment it was posted and continued to be well read through-out the year....

Much of the news concerning Cadence Design these days has not been good, but today’s announcement bucks that run of bad corporate-related news. Today the company announced the availability of an Accelerated Parallel Simulator (APS) for its Virtuoso product. The majority of RFIC designers use the Virtuoso suite for IC circuit design/simulation and in particular its Virtuoso Spectre® Circuit Simulator, which specifically solves large, complex analog and mixed-signal designs across all process nodes. The new simulator adds a breakthrough parallel circuit solver, along with a newly architected engine to give users access to multiprocessing computing platforms. The result is an...

Departments Defense News: Defense Dept. Selects Northrop Grumman for RFID III Contract Lockheed Martin Achieves Key Milestones in Design Review Phase Raytheon Achieves Critical Dual Band Radar Testing Milestone Harris Corp. Awarded Contract to Develop Interoperable Radio Architecture International Report: EADS DS Wins NATO DCIS Contract BAE Systems Partners with Greek Armed Forces Duo Six European Countries Collaborate on SDR UK KTPS Get Financial Boost GTEL-Mobile Selects NEC Microwave System for Vietnam Commercial Market: Wireless Infrastructure Vendors Hunkering Down for a Tough 2009 Femtocells to Dominate Market for Indoor Cell Coverage Handset Manufacturers Aiming to Design Their Way Out of Recession Tight Capital Complicates Terrestrial TV Set Top Market

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The path to 4G is a tricky one as Sprint Nextel must figure out how to move its CDMA-based wireless business and customers to the 4G network envisioned by Clear, Sprint’s 51%-owned WiMAX joint venture with Clearwire and partners. The challenge is to strike the right balance between Sprint's immediate opportunities which remain with CDMA and the key growth areas for US wireless services that are mobile broadband (or 4G). WiMAX appears to have strong medium term potential and is worthy of Sprint's continued support but the network will need full commitment and time (a few years at least) to...