New Technologies

A few weeks ago I attended the International Microwave Symposium to see and hear the latest cutting edge technology that is being discussed. This conference is about technologies ranging from the high frequencies of the tens of megahertz to greater than one terahertz.
I was able to listen in on some pretty interesting ideas and presentations of technology. Since many radio frequency waves need to be amplified among the many topics discussed was improvement in amplifier efficiencies. Several of the papers presented dealt with microwave amplifiers being used in the tens of gigahertz range. This is good since the more efficient an amplifier is the less energy that will be consumed. This can only help us achieve further energy consumption reduction.
A whole session was devoted to radar techniques and from the topics discussed it seems like a lot of innovative radar applications are being researched and developed. This should bode well for certain commercial applications of radar that can benefit human safety. This also means that there may be more defense research applied to more evasive munitions.
Another major area of discussion was Terahertz technology and projects that might be possible. A Terahertz signal has a wavelength on the order of the thickness of human hair. Light is in this frequency range but is treated differently. Several space projects were discussed as possibilities as this may provide more insight in to the cosmos. This projects are multi-million dollar multi-year efforts that rely solely on a willing government for funding. This is currently very difficult to do as the political climate is very stormy when it comes to government expenditure. The real difficult with terahertz technology is low efficiency components that are hard to produce. This is because we have only begun to start research in this area from an engineering perspective.
The new technology that is supposed to revolutionize many commercial products ar radio frequency minature electrical machines, otherwise known as RF MEMS. MEMS have been discussed as a future breakthrough nanotechnology that could alter medicine and other areas of life. I will discuss these technologies in a blog posting at some point in the near future. RF MEMS show promise since they will be able to allow filtering that can adapt to the demands required from the signal. This technology has the potential to alter much of our wireless life in the connected domain, but some of these designs require materials which are rare. It is only reasonable that any company that wants to commercialize this technology will think about the cost of the resource they are using.