Pat Hindle, MWJ Editor

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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.

A year or two ago, it was thought that the first 5G applications would be sub 6 GHz using technologies such as massive MIMO, high orders of carrier aggregation, heterogeneous networks, etc., to achieve better data rates, latency and capacity. But new semiconductor processes and architectures have rapidly progressed making 5G mmWave technology available today at reasonable costs.

Airbus Defence and Space has worked with 3D Systems to achieve a major breakthrough: The first 3D printed radio frequency (RF) filter tested and validated for use in commercial telecommunications satellites as outlined in their latest case study.

We don’t talk very much about local community service and high quality company culture as a technical magazine. I was lucky enough to be invited to a Microsemi reception yesterday afternoon where they showed their commitment to the local Lawrence and Lowell community at their manufacturing facility in Lawrence, MA.

Check out these 2 panels at EDI CON USA 2017 covering High Performance GaN Technology and 5G mmWave Systems and Test.

Yole Développement just released a comprehensive report on the RF power device market and here are the highlights from their article. They expect the market to recover in coming years due to increasing demand for telecom base station upgrades and small cell implementations. Overall market revenue could potentially increase 75% by the end of 2022, posting a CAGR of 9.8% from 2016-2022.

Smart clothing is emerging as a very interesting application for IoT. Last week, the Advanced Functional Fabrics of America (AFFOA) opened in Cambridge, MA near the MIT campus.

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.

Qualcomm engineers have recently completed initial testing of drones on commercial 4G LTE networks at the Qualcomm UAS Flight Center in San Diego. They evaluated key performance indicators (KPIs) such as coverage, signal strength, throughput, latency, and mobility under various scenarios on commercial LTE networks.

I look forward to this every year, when NI releases its annual Automated Test Outlook. The 2017 report reviews the key technologies impacting automated test environments from reconfigurable test instrumentation to software-centric test platforms and ecosystems for next-generation device test.