Microwave Engineering Europe November 2000 Cover story The Focus on Components for Wireless in this month's issue includes a review of the state of the art in radio transceiver chips for Bluetooth, as well as the current status and suitability of alternative materials technologies, such as RF CMOS and indium phosphide, for a variety of wireless standards. Amid the chatter of Bluetooth As a glance at the front cover will show, Bluetooth certainly is 'flavour of the month' for this issue. The success of our Bluetooth Conference in Edinburgh at the end of October is an indication of the extent to which the industry is keen to know more about this exciting application - one that promises to provide an almost limitless market for RF chips in the next few years. The order of volumes - billions of nodes - currently being predicted will undoubtedly do the industry no harm, and the economies of scale afforded by such a high demand will almost certainly make other wireless technologies more competitive too. Some of the speakers at the Bluetooth Conference however, felt that such large volumes could be a mixed blessing with regard to the usability of the technology. To quote Craig Ochibuko of Broadcom, "By 2005, finding the right node to communicate with will be an issue". We can only hope that technology can find a means to make the old saying about hearing your own name in a crowded room work for Bluetooth as well. In any case, I must admit to some scepticism about the validity of the Bluetooth predictions out to 2005. It's not that I don't believe wireless personal area networking will be big business by then, but I do think consumer acceptance of this level of external control in our lives can be over-estimated. Just because it will be technically possible for Appliance A to communicate with Appliance B doesn't mean that anyone will actually want it to. Also, some of the 'key applications' for Bluetooth that were put forward at the Conference, such as connecting a PC to a fixed phone line, have been technically possible for some time using DECT but have not yet taken off. Some industry experts believe this to be just a question of marketing and promotion, but I still need to be convinced. With the constant demand for higher data rates and more bandwidth, as well as the overcrowding of the 2.4GHz band, it's more than likely that the Bluetooth nodes in use in 2005 will have followed WLAN into the 5GHz band. As well as raising interoperability issues, it will be interesting to see how this affects the delicate balance between the competing semiconductor materials and processes, which is discussed in the Focus on Components for Wireless in this issue. The latest Bluetooth product offerings from both chip and subsystem vendors also form a major part of the Focus. The issue also contains the first installment of the solutions to the CAD Benchmark problem outlined in last month's issue. Six leading vendors of EM CAD responded to the invitation, and to do their responses justice we have had to split the feature into two sections, the second of which will appear next month. We will also publish the submissions in full on the Microwave Engineering Online Web site at www.mwee.com. Helen Duncan

Contents In focus Vector modulator brings signal generator versatility Wireless Watch InnoCOMM develops 5GHz WLAN solution; Date for UK 28GHz auction; Wireless forecasts sending different signals Focus on Components for wireless GaAs still a contender for Bluetooth; Bulk devices use less volume; Indium phoshide makes impact in wireless; SiGe boosts sensitivity for static prescalers CAD Benchmark In the October 2000 issue we outlined the details of our latest CAD Benchmark. The response from CAD vendors has produced so much information that we are running the results over the next two issues. The December/January issue will also contain the measured results on the original hardware. [ View article as HTML ] A 2.6GHz Microstrip hairpin filter design using CAD and EDA tools This paper demonstrates the design of a four-section 2.6GHz microstrip hairpin filter using the Serenade Design Environment from Ansoft. The design was validated both by the use of Ansoft Ensemble 2.5D planar electromagnetic simulator and by the measurement of a prototype created with LPKF ProtoMat 95s and prepared with LPKF CircuitCAM and BoardMaster applications. [ View article as HTML ] Active SAR antenna for airborne 56-channel operation The Mini-Circuits Student Fellowship award winning paper describes a new system implementation of an active antenna for a forward looking airborne synthetic aperture array radar (SAR) with digital beamforming on-receive only. [ View article as HTML ] Use of an InP/InGaAs double heterostructure phototransistor in a 40GHz OEMMIC photoreceiver This paper was awarded the Microwave Prize at the 30th European Microwave Conference. It presents an InP/InGaAs double-heterostructure phototransistor with a record optical gain cut off frequency of 82GHz, and an OEMMIC photoreceiver based this structure. The photoreceiver operates at 40GHz, the highest operating frequency currently reported for such a device [ View article as HTML ] Sommaire d'articles Zusammenfassung der Artikel New Products and Data Calendar Classified Catalogue Update & Appointments