RF-DESIGNER AND IC-DESIGNER - 2 PROFESSIONS SEPARATED BY AN UNCOMMON LANGUAGE

Walking around the floor of various industry exhibits, the lack of har dware in half the booths becomes apparent. Where are the packages with the RF connectors? Where do you connect the cables? How do you screw them down? More and more of today's RF and microwave products are ICs in chip form or in those crazy little SOIC packages. The hardware part of the business is changing as rapidly as the technology itself. Alon g with these changes comes a whole new breed of technologist the IC de signer, and in his bag come new fools, new techniques and a whole new language to learn. Change is always difficult particularly when older microwave engineers have been so protective of the black art of microw ave circuitry and its distributed character. Along come these tech-typ es that insist it can all be done on the head of a pin and by the 10s of 1000s instead of just 10, and without diddle sticks and razor blade s to make them work. This tongue-in-cheek look at the changing industr y is intended to bring a smile to that perplexed look while explaining new terms and techniques that these wafer-masters are using to help u s navigate the new low cost, miniature world of hand-held microwave sy stems. If develops an appreciation for the differences in a changing i ndustry.