Pat Hindle, MWJ Editor
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Pat Hindle is responsible for editorial content, article review and special industry reporting for Microwave Journal magazine and its web site in addition to social media and special digital projects. Prior to joining the Journal, Mr. Hindle held various technical and marketing positions throughout New England, including Marketing Communications Manager at M/A-COM (Tyco Electronics), Product/QA Manager at Alpha Industries (Skyworks), Program Manager at Raytheon and Project Manager/Quality Engineer at MIT. Mr. Hindle graduated from Northeastern University - Graduate School of Business Administration and holds a BS degree from Cornell University in Materials Science Engineering.

IMS2020 Highlights

August 7, 2020

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I attended the virtual IMS2020 event this week and wanted to highlight some of the significant product announcements I saw in the news. Analog Devices announced its collaboration with Intel to create a flexible radio platform that addresses 5G network design challenges and will enable customers to scale their 5G networks more quickly and economically. The new radio platform combines the advanced technology of ADI’s RF transceivers with the high performance and low power of Intel FPGAs giving developers a new set of design tools to easily create optimized 5G solutions.

Keysight Technologies announced inter-operability development testing of O-RAN radio units in collaboration with Cambridge Industries Group headquartered in Shanghai. The testing was accomplished using CIG's O-RU and Keysight's Open RAN Studio, signal source and analyzer solutions to create an environment for 5G new radio modulation analysis.

NI announced a collaboration with Eta Wireless to implement and demonstrate full support of ET-Advanced, the industry’s first digital envelope tracking technology for mmWave 5G RF front-end devices. The technology enables extended battery life in smartphones, wearables and IoT devices, improving both data rates and connectivity range.

Anokiwave and hiSky announced a collaboration to enable the next generation of low cost, voice, data and IoT SATCOM terminals. hiSky brings its innovative business models, technical expertise for implementation of satellite communication systems, and its low cost, performance focused MODEM-on-chip ASIC, while Anokiwave provides its Silicon Beamformer ICs that enable small form factor flat panel active antennas for SATCOM.

Tabor Electronics introduced the industry’s first Arbitrary Waveform Transceiver which is aimed at R&D labs for many applications including quantum computing which they will cover in our September A&D Supplement so watch for our Quantum technology coverage in that issue.

I also attended the 5G Summit and was impressed with the lineup of speakers. There were several semiconductor technologies covered discussing the current state of III/V compound semiconductors and Silicon to meet the demands of 5G and others about the future technologies for 6G featuring those operating in the 100 to 300 GHz range. One of the interesting talks was from Dr. I of China Mobile talking about the O-RAN or whitebox industry collaboration. She reviewed several myths about the effort being confined to certain applications or just hardware or software when it is a total system approach for 5G ecosystem transformation.

ORAN 1

One interesting effort she mentioned to increase system efficiency is Artificial Intelligence Enabled Digital Predistortion which is being explored by a group of companies.

ORAN 2

The closing session was interesting with Hartmut Neven from Google covering Quantum Computing. The most interesting take away is the amount of microwave components and equipment needed for Quantum Computing which is summarized below in two of his slides.

Quantum 1
Quantum 2

Overall, the IMS2020 committee did a great job of re-inventing the event online which was a huge task to accomplish in a few months. Next year is in Atlanta so we hope to see everyone there in person.