May The Fourth Be With You!
It’s always my goal to write the Samtec blog on May 4, but it doesn’t always work that way. Force ghosts, Mando, Grogu, and old-school Bib Fortuna, Star Wars (and other sci-fi movies) make me think about what’s possible.
Who’d ever think we’d have such global connectivity? In Star Wars, if you were out of communications range, a droid would just boost power. That’s what Obi-Wan Kenobi asked R4-P17 (“R4” for short) to do when they were on Geonosis in Star Wars: The Clone Wars. Presto! He leaves a message for Anakin Skywalker on Padmé Amidala on Tatooine, and they come to help him – eventually.
Unfortunately, modern communications systems are not quite that easy to design and implement. RF engineers and system designers face many practical challenges, especially in mmWave applications 5G/6G, EW, SATCOM, radar, and instrumentation.
What’s an RF engineer to do? Call a droid? Wouldn’t that be easy?
IMS 2023 Industry Workshop – Antenna-to-Bits Implementations
Well, the real world of wireless and RF engineering doesn’t work that way. At least not yet. Thankfully, Samtec and its partners are developing solutions, collaborations, and design methodologies to help make mmWave Antenna-to-Bits Implementation easier.
RF system design takes a village. Any OEM is likely to work with vendors from the following industries: semiconductors, interconnect, simulation, test + measurement, distribution, and more. IMS 2023 attendees can benefit from the combined expertise of their representative vendors in the Industry Workshop Balancing Tradeoffs: Taming Signal Integrity Challenges in mm wave Antenna-to-Bits Implementations.
In this Industry Workshop at IMS 2023, technical experts from Otava, Samtec, MathWorks, Avnet, and Rohde & Schwarz address the challenges of mmWave system design, detailing the interplay between simulation models and real-world signals through design flows that foster collaboration within multi-disciplinary engineering teams.
The presenters will also review practical design tradeoffs engineers must make due to mm Wave band sensitivity. Engineers must preserve channel SI while optimizing component selection at a reasonable cost. Simulating and testing system architectures at the electrical and protocol layers demand engineering expertise from RF, phased-array antenna design, SI, embedded software, DSP, FPGA, and test.
How’s it all come together? If you don’t have a droid like R2-D2, R4-P17, or R5-D4, attending this Industry Workshop will definitely help! Be on the lookout for a real-world 5G ORAN case study as well.
In the meantime, May The Fourth Be With You!
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