A Few Great RF & Microwave Engineering Articles for May 2017
RFMD (now Qorvo) was
an early player in the gallium nitride (GaN) semiconductor field. During the time I was employed there
as an applications engineer in the 2000s, the company bought a start-up GaN firm called
RF Nitro Communications,
and moved their equipment and staff onto RFMD's Greensboro campus. The engineers and scientists were
struggling to fabricate 2" wafers at the time (the 2001 link mentions striving
for a 4" wafer, but they were still at 2" when I left in 2007). The cost of GaN amplifiers was
very expensive due to low yield and small wafer size. Having come from the defense electronics realm,
I suggested to one or more managers that they approach the DoD as a customer since it has notoriously
deep pockets, but it fell on deaf ears (my e-mail is somewhere in their archives).
Now, defense contractors are major customers of GaN devices. I still believe RFMD's GaN progress would
have been greatly accelerated had they partnered with the DoD early on. But, hey, that's just my opinion,
an probably explains why I (and others) never considered myself management material. I only mention
my GaN story because of the prominence that GaN is gaining in the 5G world, as evidenced by the first
article in the list.
Items move onto and off of all homepages quickly, so even if you visit Microwave & RF,
Microwave Journal, Microwave Product Digest, High Frequency Electronics,
et al, regularly, you might have missed something in the list below.
RF Cafe began life in 1996 as "RF Tools" in an AOL screen name web space totaling
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formulas and reference material while performing my work as an RF system and circuit
design engineer. The World Wide Web (Internet) was largely an unknown entity at
the time and bandwidth was a scarce commodity. Dial-up modems blazed along at 14.4 kbps
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RFMD (now Qorvo) was
an early player in the gallium nitride (GaN) semiconductor field. During the time I was employed there
as an applications engineer in the 2000s, the company bought a start-up GaN firm called
