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New for this year I have put together my predictions for 2010 for RF and microwave industry related topics. Some are conservative because they are based on recent events or articles and some are just things that I think might have a possibility of happening but the probability is relatively low. So here we go: - The US Gov’t Broadband Initiative Stimulus money will be slow to come but even with the many hundreds of millions given out, it will have little or no affect on rural broadband access penetration (see our Oct 09 article on the Broadband Stimulus Program)
- LDMOS and GaN will gain major market share in the power product applications and become the leading materials for high power applications in their respective frequency sweet spots (see our June 09 article on the Power Brokers)
- We will see some control components integrated on GaN MMICs (i.e. switches, limiters, etc.)
- Nonlinear characterization advancements in the last couple of years will take hold in the marketplace as widely accepted techniques (X-parameters, S-functions, etc.)
- Several amplifiers with greater than 80% efficiency above 1 GHz will be developed as new high efficiency design techniques are exploited
- LTE will make large gains in deployments but not come close to exceeding WiMAX in the number of users (in 2011 I predict LTE will overtake WiMAX)
- SoC and SiP solutions will start to take hold in several applications where discrete solutions used to rule (WiFi, GPS, Bluetooth, etc.) - see our Feb 09 article on SoC/SiP
- Wireless HDTV products will be released into the mass market and one protocol will distance its self as the leading solution of the 4 vying for acceptance (see our Aug 09 article on Wireless HDTV)
- RFID will finally take off and see significant growth in multiple markets including front of the store (POS) applications
- As a result of the terrorists taping into our UAV video signals, new funding and significant resources will be spent on wireless encryption for the US military
- As a result of the failed terrorist attack on the Detroit bound plane, there will be renewed interest and purchases of mmWave and Terahertz body scanners for airport security
- As the military backs off the Future Combat Systems approach as being too expensive, advanced software defined radios will be demonstrated for near future systems
- Smart IED jammers will be developed that actively adapt to different frequencies via software control as IED attacks continue to dominate our attention (see our August 08 supplement article on IED Jammers)
- A new military broadband satellite communications program will be proposed to ease the capacity crunch for bandwidth (see our August 09 article on the SATCOM Capacity Crunch)
Let me know what you think will happen this year with your comments.