European Microwave Week, 2010

- a review of 13th European Microwave Week, EuMW held at CNIT, La Defense, Paris from 26 September to 1 October 2010.

European Microwave Week, EuMW was held at CNIT in the La Defense business sector of Paris between 26th September and 1st October 2010.

The aim of the event was to bring industry, academia and commerce together and to provide an atmosphere where information, experience and details of the latest developments and products could be exchanged.

The event was well subscribed and attracted an estimated 1700 conference delegates, over 5000 visitors and over 250 exhibitors. Exhibitors not only came from Western Europe but also North America as well as significant numbers of companies from Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.

Unlike some other electronics based events that are seeing a decline in interest, EuMW attracted many people, provided a means by which people could network, and also through the conference, it enabled engineers, academics and others associated with the industry to learn more about the latest developments, allowing them to fully justify the cost of attending.

European Microwave Week constituents

The overall European Microwave Week EuMW, combines four major focuses:

• Four major conferences
• Associated workshops
• Courses and seminars for industrial participants and scientists
• An international trade show with leading industry companies

Four EuMW conferences

Over the course of the week there were four separate but complementary conferences, the first starting on Sunday 26th September:

• The European Microwave Conference (EuMC):   This is the main event behind EuMW and was held between 28 and 30 September. It included a wide variety of contributions ranging from advanced radio technologies for 4G cellular systems to GaN power amplifiers and from millimetre-wave front end solutions to enabling technologies for personal health and positioning.
• The European Wireless Technology Conference (EuWiT):   This conference was organised under the umbrella of the European Microwave Association and the GAAS Association and was held from 27 to 28 September 2010. It again provided a huge number of presentations ranging from microwave photonics to EM field theory and microwave characterisation of material parameters to couplers and combiners.
• The European Radar Conference (EuRAD):   The 7th European Radar Conference (EuRAD 2010) was held from 30 September to 1 October 2010. Again this conference provided a huge number of presentations on all aspects of radar technology from meteorological radar to FMCW radar and radiation, propagation and scattering to signal processing.
• The European Microwave Integrated Circuits Conference (EuMIC):   The 5th European Microwave Integrated Circuits (EuMIC) Conference was held from 27 to 28 September 2010. This event focussed on RF microelectronics and again there were presentations on all aspects of microwave IC technology from broadband Pas to reconfigurable voltage controlled oscillators and wireless antennas to ultra-wideband radio.

The combination of these events meant that European Microwave Week provided a huge amount of information for engineers working in the RF and microwave arena.

In addition to these conferences, many of the exhibitors provided their own workshops and seminars allowing all the attendees to have access to learning sessions in one form or another.

European Microwave Week exhibition

There were over 250 exhibitors at the exhibition at EuMW, ranging from suppliers of RF components through the RF modules to RF systems as well as many companies proving test equipment and RF and microwave services. There were naturally many new releases and plenty of interesting products to view. Many of the major industry players used EuMW as a platform to launch new products or to showcase many existing ones.

Components at EuMW

Offering many quartz based devices, Precision Devices were showing many of their high stability products. In particular they announced the OCXO-510, and ultra-low noise and ultra-stable oven controlled crystal oscillator. The new OCXO-510 has a precision of 0.0002 ppm (0.2 ppb) over a temperature range of 0 to 70°C. With the device package measuring 50.8 mm square it provides an output at 10 MHz and is expected to find many applications as a reference in synthesizers and PLLs for telecoms systems, microwave communications, radar and GPS.

Analog Devices Inc, ADI were showcasing a number of their new chips. Now established for over 45 years, Analog Devices is one of the leaders in this field. Their portfolio now allows designers to address most areas of radio receiver and transmitter design for the cellular and wireless industries with a growing portfolio across the RF signal chain.

One offering they were showcasing at EuMW was the series of Variable Gain Amplifiers which offer much greater levels of integration, The ADL 5201, 5202, 5204, and 5243 combine up to four discrete RF / IF blocks into a single device. This allows designers to reduce the number of components within a wireless or radio device , thereby realising significant savings. Not only do these chips offer increased levels of integration, but they provide improved performance. Said Peter real, VP Linear products at ADI: These new RF / IF variable gain amplifiers further expand ADI's commitment to offering best in class levels of integration and performance for both RF and IF applications.

Circuit simulation at EuMW

Computer simulation software was a major player at the exhibition. With circuits needing to be designed faster and to more exacting standards, the only way forward is to utilise simulation. AWR made a number of announcements at the show related to their Microwave Office®, EDA, electronic design automation software. These included the fact that it now incorporates full support for S-functions, which are nonlinear behavioural models developed by NMDG NV of Belgium. They also announced the availability of NXP Semiconductor's sixth- and seventh generation laterally-diffused metal oxide semiconductor (LDMOS) power transistor library for Microwave Office.

Another company, CST also made an announcement. Using their CST Microwave Studio, their latest software release is aimed at engineers facing electromagnetic problems. The new software provides a number of enhancements to the software including enhancements to the material property descriptions across the entire palette of available solvers. There is improved performance for the computing options for the frequency domain and the integral equation solver.

Test instruments

National Instruments were showing their PXI Vector Network Analyzer, claimed to be the world's first. The VNA is contained within a single PXI module, and this enables full vector analysis for forward s-parameters to be incorporated into design validation and production test systems. The new VNA PXI module retails for $25 999 it starts shipping at the end of October 2010.

The Agilent stand also had plenty of new equipment there for the RF and microwave engineer. Their stand featured a number of new products including the PNA-X a 67 GHz vector network analyser. This in turn can be expanded to give a four port 110 GHz four port single sweep solution.

Agilent were also showing their many PXI solutions along with their new AXIe system - as the new AXIe standard gets off the ground, proving a much greater level of capability than PXI. The aim that Agilent has is to provide the same basic measurement technology across a variety of control / interface standards from separate boxes to PXI and AXIe. Ron Nersesian said: "Rarely is a single hardware or software solution the right answer for every test scenario. Now whether they're involved in sophisticated research, development, design, or manufacturing, system developers will be able to achieve new levels of speed, performance and flexibility with our PXI and AXIe products."

Rohde & Schwarz were showing some impressive wares as well. They released an announcement about their FSVR spectrum analyser claiming it to be the first instrument to combine the functions of an all-purpose signal and spectrum analyser with a real-time spectrum analyser. In real-time mode the FSVR detects everything from sporadic events to ultra-short signals. This makes the analyser particularly appropriate for developing systems for LTE, WiMAX, WLAN, etc as well as for radar and frequency hopping applications.

A further announcement from R & S was the release of their ZVA110 network analyser that provides gapless measurement coverage from 10 MHz right up to 110 GHz. This network analyser provides a high dynamic range, high output power and fast measurement speed to make this analyser ideal for measurements on both passive and active devices will into the millimetre range. The new analyser is expected to find applications with a number of systems including parking assistance systems using 77 GHz, radar applications at 94 GHz and wireless backhaul using 79 / 80 GHz.

Phase noise is of interest to most RF engineers. Traditionally it has taken a long time to gain meaningful phase noise measurements. A company named NoiseXT (formerly Aeroflex Europtest) was exhibiting their DCNTS dual channel phase noise test system that allows cross correlation to cancel internal noise and produce plots with a noise floor of -195 dBc/Hz. The cross correlation enables the system to reject AM noise while measuring the residual phase noise. The test system is pulse compatible and this makes it ideal for many aerospace and defence applications. Guillaume de Giovanni, the president of Noise XT commented: "This has been an excellent year for Noise XT. Since we re-launched our company in January, customers have been engaging with us."

EuMW for next year

European Microwave Week is set to continue for many years. Venues have already been arranged for the coming years. For 2011 European Microwave Week will be in Manchester, and following that venues are publicised for Amsterdam (2012), Nuremburg (2013) and Rome (2014). The advantage that European Microwave Week has is that it is able to offer an extensive programme of lectures on a variety of different RF and microwave areas and then combine this with a good sized exhibition.