Here’s my weekly collection of industry-related news items that I found worth passing along to you.

Companies and Products

Advanced RF Technologies (ADRF) announced a family of low PIM passive components with 4.3-10 connectors that cover 578 to 2700 MHz. The products include hybrid couplers, directional couplers, duplexers and splitters.

Bloomberg reported that Apple is developing a watch with an LTE radio that won’t require connection to an iPhone. Intel will supply the modem. Maintaining reasonable battery life has been the main development challenge.

Lockheed Martin is constructing a $350 million production facility near Denver for next-generation satellites. The project, slated for completion in 2020, includes a high bay clean room capable of simultaneously building satellites from micro to macro.

Adding to its optical market position, MACOM bought the high speed optical receiver (HSOR) business from Luna Innovations for $33.5 million. The HSOR line consists of the Picometrix brand of high speed integrated coherent receivers and photodiodes.

Pasternack released E- and W-Band SPST and DPDT PIN diode switches having WR12 and WR10 interfaces, respectively. The switches have typical insertion loss of 4 dB, greater than 25 dB isolation and less than 300 nsec switching speed.

Qorvo introduced a dual GaN transistor designed for an asymmetric Doherty power amplifier (PA) covering 2.5 to 2.7 GHz. The Doherty PA delivers 50 W average output power with 60 percent efficiency in a Doherty configuration.

Mobile filter start-up Resonant released their Q2 business update. The company added a seventh customer, grew design backlog, generated the first royalty revenue — albeit small — and recruited two senior players to join their engineering staff.

Rockwell Collins received a follow-on award for HMS manpack radios, as they compete for a production contract. Two suppliers will share the estimated $12.7 billion, 10 year production program.

Seeing a $1.8 billion automotive market opportunity, TowerJazz is targeting RF applications — radar and connectivity — with their SiGe Terabit and RFCMOS process platforms.

Markets and Technology

Cellular and 5G — Apple and Samsung are struggling to be a significant presence in the Chinese smartphone market. Both lost share from Q2 2016 to Q2 2017.

Verizon, Ericsson and Qualcomm achieved 953 Mbps download speeds in a trial of license assisted access (LAA) on a Verizon network in Florida. They were close to Gigabit LTE's peak physical layer download speed of approximately 979 Mbps.

Nokia Bell Labs is leading a consortium of industry vendors, operators, IT companies, small and medium-sized enterprises and European academic institutions to develop the next-generation platform-as-a-service (NGPaaS) to create 5G systems that reside in the cloud. Today’s telecom model is an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) model, which won’t provide the flexibility and performance needed for 5G.

Applying a road trip analogy to 5G: Are we there yet? Consultant Doug Dawson opines that it’s going to take a lot longer for actual commercial deployment than the near-weekly press releases about demos suggest.

Internet Access — The number of internet users in China reached 751 million during the first half of 2017, with 96 percent having mobile access. Despite the large number, internet penetration in China is only 54.3 percent.

The next billion internet users from developing regions of the world will be mobile and likely won't type. They will rely on voice and video. Fascinating story in The Wall Street Journal.

Autonomous Driving — On the road to self-driving, the new Tesla Model 3 has a non-operating — for now — driver-facing camera. The camera covers the whole cabin, not just the driver. electrek broke the story and discusses the implications.

Having just acquired Mobileye, Intel plans to build the first of what will be more than 100 “fully autonomous” vehicles — level 4 SAE, also called “high driving automation.” The cars will integrate Mobileye's computer vision, sensing, fusion, mapping and driving policy and use Intel’s open compute platforms and data center/5G communication technologies, with the objective of developing a complete “car-to-cloud” system. Read Intel’s press release.

Defense — What if North Korea really does launch a ballistic missile toward Guam? Can we shoot it down? The New York Times assesses our options.

Immigration — Apparently the tech industry isn't keen on the president's proposed merit-based immigration model.

Last Word — Ending on a positive note: a 16-year-old invented a low cost, smartphone-based artificial intelligence (AI) system that can identify diabetic retinopathy. She learned about the disease because her grandfather had it.

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