I agree broadly with the author but I think they miss the fact that American EE supply is not going to grow at e.g., 7% year over year. The infra for training new EEs, that is, the technical university, is losing the societial investment and public policy that made it possible.
> I've worked in the aerospace industry for the past 8 years, and for most of that time I felt like I could confidently say that RF engineering felt like it was a quiet, non evolving field.
Not an EE myself but honestly baffled how the author got that impression with the huge expansion of RF engineering in the consumer space - particularly with 3/4/5G/LTE networks and 802.1x. Maybe this is just an artifact of working on building weapons (i.e. defense) and being in the US?
I agree with the author, certainly 5 years ago most things looked like a "solved problem". Huawei gave the telco equipment makers a run for their money with some interesting applications of SDR, but incumbents preferred trade barriers and export restrictions to competition. Even 5G was more of an optimisation of LTE than a revolution. Baseband over fibre is the only major innovation in that period which I can think of.
Going into the RF field myself, I've been troubled with the license costs of tools like HFSS and CST. After a brief test of the open source tool OpenEMS I've landed firmly on the newer open source tool EMerge (https://github.com/FennisRobert/EMerge). It's a little rough around the edges still as it was released in the fall. But I've already gotten good results from it designing my own RF hardware.
Apart from that I wonder how much of the resurgence can be traced back to more active conflicts around the world? There is a booming Drone and EW development within the military sector which could be what drives it?
On the military front, the US has pressured allies to spend more GDP on weapons. Most countries have realised that as domestic industrial policy, rather than shell out foreign exchange for (cost ineffective) US made equipment.
I don't know that I agree with the article's point about stagnation ("quiet, non-evolving field") as there have been plenty of new developments in the 2010s and 2020s, but speaking as someone who hires RF engineers of various sorts, the hiring market is definitely heating up. As the article points out, space seems to be the main driver by a huge margin, with Amazon especially as well as SpaceX hiring a ridiculous number of folks directly and then the second-order LEO military applications pushing a boom on that side as well. Apple has affected the hiring on the handset baseband side some too, but nowhere near as much as space.
This article also needs a huge (in the US) disclaimer on it as Europe, especially, has had a boom in automotive components and vehicle telemetry in recent years and obviously a lot of consumer devices and handset stuff comes out of China now.
I always wanted to get into RF design, but couldn't find it within the mega company I work for (we integrate more than we design at the component level). RF design has always been a bit of black magic, even as an EE. Other than some really great books from ARRL in the amateur radio arena, I haven't found too many good "as it really works in the working world" references. Can anyone point at any good books and/or sites that go into detail about this fascinating field?
Sorry not sure what books would be good (I learnt the bits and bobs I know mostly on the job from grey-beards!) but I always like to chime in when people talk about black magic that part of learning about RF it's not that crazy - just unintuitive if you think in terms of the lower frequency and DC stuff - because once you lean about it, it basically turns out that really low frequency stuff and DC are basically a special case of RF, and you can see the RF effects in all sorts of things, like any decently fast UART or other signals.
So yeah, I would encourage any EE to look into it, because having an idea about RF can make any electronic design better (especially around things like EMC!)
I would actually go so far to say as I am not aware of any good "as it really works" references. Handbooks exist, but they're pretty expensive.
Since you have an EE background, I would recommend a few strategies (in any order, except 0 should be first if you have major deficiencies):
0) Brush up on some of your math if you need to. Linear algebra (just up to Eigenvector/Eigenvalue), vector calculus, differential equations. Mostly just understanding the concepts is OK, because the major derivations for RF engineering are relatively simple problems. That said, RF engineering is just one big love letter to linear algebra.
1) Read Pozar, as another commenter have suggested, but you don't need to cover-to-cover it. You absolutely must know some network theory, the basics of transmission lines (characteristic impedance, propagation, loaded driving point impedance), and simple matching techniques (basic RF design is about 75% just making sure power goes where you want it to). Beyond that you can pick and choose depending precisely on what you're doing.
2) Read older papers (1940s-1980s depending on topic) on whatever you're interested in. They're going to assume relatively little starting information. The only caveats are that notation has changed and that a lot of the design techniques, while still valid, were more useful when simulators weren't readily available (i.e. they assume a really strong mathematical background).
3) Stay low frequency as much as possible early on. <6 GHz for sure, ideally lower. This makes things a lot cheaper (metrology, components) and makes mechanical tolerances less critical. Stuff just gets less "fiddly". There's of course a tradeoff where things start to get pretty big at low (10-100's MHz) frequencies.
4) Tear apart anything you can get your hands on -- broken metrology equipment for one. Try and figure out why people are doing what they're doing. Just because a system's cheap doesn't mean they aren't using some cool tricks.
I'm one of the young(er) few who stuck with hardware out of passion rather than follow the comfortable allure of software that all my peers did.
You make less money, often half. You need to commute to work. Work prospects are narrower and heavily military biased. You get exposed to harmful materials/chemicals. Hardware development is slow, tedious, and punishing compared to software. Having a home lab requires far far more than a laptop. Information is much more sparse so being around knowledgeable others is often critical.
The industry is packed with grey beards, I'm often the youngest guy by 20 years in customer meetings.
Maybe things will change now that we're in a period of uncertainty, but I see hardware as being a thing for the second world and unlikely to stage a big comeback.
It’s funny because I always tried to go into hardware side but I get pulled into the software or software and integration. I got myself learning fpga and pcb and all, tried to get into an exclusive hardware role, never got the chance, it also make things worse if you are in Canada since hardware opportunities aren’t that much, and either they have the hardware title but all you do is barely designing (for example, I applied before for a radar engineer and while interviewing it turned out they just procure radars, not building and designing), or a hardware role but requires a deep expertise in a very specific area that hard to acquire unless you are in the industry like some roles in AMD or Intel. But I always loved hardware more than software, and way before AI or even neo-tools like github and git existed, maybe because software is basically writing and I am not fan of writing in general, while hardware it’s more of component based logical thinking, who knows, but if I managed to get into the hardware I would definitely do.
Author here :) glad this sparked some discussion. A few folks raised the geographic scope and consumer RF side, which are fair things to flag. I tried to cover automotive, 5G, and IoT in the piece, though looking back at this, I could've framed the opening more clearly, as it was more a gut feeling specific to my US aerospace / defense experience rather than a universal claim. That context should've been clearer from the start. Still learning/new to writing more publicly so knowing where the framing didn't land is super helpful for me going forward
Unfortunately for us software types, somebody with an EE degree can go into software and then pivot back into RF engineering. I doubt that somebody with a CS degree could (as in, I think they'd be intellectually capable of it, but they'd never get hired).
I never understand why posts like this do not start with explaining what they are talking about. I am not familiar with the abbreviation RF and I'm not going on a research quest to guess which one the author could mean.
Also for a student: I was at university 20 years ago and there was no possibility to "hack" RF devices.
Right now, with less than 200€ (a NanoVNA and a good SDR), you can do almost everything.
This is my recent comments on the new RF System-on-Module (SoM) assemblies [1].
If you want to venture or pivot into RF, especially from software background this is the golden time that's made possible/feasible by software-defined radio (SDR) technology as mentioned in the OP article.
One very important thing that the article did not mention is the emerging and increasing popularity of physical AI [2]. RF can be the crucial enabler to to further enhance human limited sensing capabilities with EM based waveforms. A simple analogy is how the dog's powerful smelling capabilities is helping/enhancing human detection capability.
Rather than just training and inferencing on image based I/O, the physical AI now can feed on the much richer RF, mmWave, THz and LIDAR raw waveforms. The good news is that the latter processing of mmWave, THz and LIDAR, can be greatly enhanced by the former lower RF baseband (modulated information signals) that's not previously possible/feasible.
[1] Comments on "ADSY1100-Series: RF System-on-Module Assemblies":
You're right, and Hubble Network (https://hubble.com) is proof. We make commodity Bluetooth LE chips talk to satellites. That required antenna design and link budget work no software abstraction would fix.
Hubble does the deep RF work so that firmware engineers building IoT devices never have to.
>>> The underlying physics (electromagnetics, thermodynamics, materials science, manufacturing tolerances) don't reduce to algorithms. You have to build intuition for it, and that's not something you can shortcut.
I've come full circle, and it is amazing how much has changed since I've last worked with anything in this field. Frequencies and a degree of precision and insight that you could have only dreamed of on a normal person's budget in the 80's are now easily attainable and combined with some knowledge of software there isn't a whole lot you can not do that you can think of, as long as it is physically possible and you have the time to spare to implement it. Still, it's hardware, and debugging is an order of magnitude harder than debugging software, so you have to prepare for that, as well as to make sure you get very close to being 100% right on your first try, respins in hardware are - unlike software - very expensive and can easily kill you. And in a way that's good, and it would be much better still if the software world was somehow forced to stop shipping halfbaked stuff.
Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast. It pays off to have multiple experts really look at every part of a design and think through it before shipping. Don't treat anything as trivial.
This person knows nothing about RF and is just another applications monkey. Without taking fields and waves you are at best a technician. Anyone who actually worked in defense knows that minicircuits is a notorious company that pays very poorly and has massive turnover. Many of the other defense/space RF subs are just the same. The author is just mangling all RF communications applications into one big ball. And of course the authors pathetic theory background means that RADAR is the only sensing application they "understand".
There was never a decline in RF engineering demand, it's actually going up massively. But not in the US, Canada, Sweden... all the work is in China.
It will actually be impossible to catch up with China on RF unless the US and Europe legislate for IP (not manufacturing!) to originate in the West. No Huawei 5G, no cheap Chinese SDN/ethernet, etc. Core switching and 5/6G edge. Remove patent protection for 5G designs.
This is the correct take. The industry is a decade or two behind China in terms of raw engineering headcount. All that remains in the talent pool must shelter around military contracts and subcontracts as they just can't survive on the open market. The IP laws combined with the Chinese ability to copy anything is overpowering.
RF seems to have been doing fine? Like you specifically mention telco, and I have been watching a steady stream of rf telco products and improvements released over just the last 15 years? You sort of skip straight to 5G ignoring everything up until that point.
Even as a dot point mentioning the whole WiGig -> IgniteNet thing? Is that not interesting to you?
44 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 67.8 ms ] threadNot an EE myself but honestly baffled how the author got that impression with the huge expansion of RF engineering in the consumer space - particularly with 3/4/5G/LTE networks and 802.1x. Maybe this is just an artifact of working on building weapons (i.e. defense) and being in the US?
Apart from that I wonder how much of the resurgence can be traced back to more active conflicts around the world? There is a booming Drone and EW development within the military sector which could be what drives it?
This article also needs a huge (in the US) disclaimer on it as Europe, especially, has had a boom in automotive components and vehicle telemetry in recent years and obviously a lot of consumer devices and handset stuff comes out of China now.
So yeah, I would encourage any EE to look into it, because having an idea about RF can make any electronic design better (especially around things like EMC!)
Since you have an EE background, I would recommend a few strategies (in any order, except 0 should be first if you have major deficiencies):
0) Brush up on some of your math if you need to. Linear algebra (just up to Eigenvector/Eigenvalue), vector calculus, differential equations. Mostly just understanding the concepts is OK, because the major derivations for RF engineering are relatively simple problems. That said, RF engineering is just one big love letter to linear algebra.
1) Read Pozar, as another commenter have suggested, but you don't need to cover-to-cover it. You absolutely must know some network theory, the basics of transmission lines (characteristic impedance, propagation, loaded driving point impedance), and simple matching techniques (basic RF design is about 75% just making sure power goes where you want it to). Beyond that you can pick and choose depending precisely on what you're doing.
2) Read older papers (1940s-1980s depending on topic) on whatever you're interested in. They're going to assume relatively little starting information. The only caveats are that notation has changed and that a lot of the design techniques, while still valid, were more useful when simulators weren't readily available (i.e. they assume a really strong mathematical background).
3) Stay low frequency as much as possible early on. <6 GHz for sure, ideally lower. This makes things a lot cheaper (metrology, components) and makes mechanical tolerances less critical. Stuff just gets less "fiddly". There's of course a tradeoff where things start to get pretty big at low (10-100's MHz) frequencies.
4) Tear apart anything you can get your hands on -- broken metrology equipment for one. Try and figure out why people are doing what they're doing. Just because a system's cheap doesn't mean they aren't using some cool tricks.
You make less money, often half. You need to commute to work. Work prospects are narrower and heavily military biased. You get exposed to harmful materials/chemicals. Hardware development is slow, tedious, and punishing compared to software. Having a home lab requires far far more than a laptop. Information is much more sparse so being around knowledgeable others is often critical.
The industry is packed with grey beards, I'm often the youngest guy by 20 years in customer meetings.
Maybe things will change now that we're in a period of uncertainty, but I see hardware as being a thing for the second world and unlikely to stage a big comeback.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47926755
cue rimshot
Mostly, expensive tools became more accessible like TinySA, LiteVNA64 and NanoVNA.
For the amateur Ham hobby, it has been a bit of a golden age with <$50 rtl-sdr SDR kits. =3
https://www.rtl-sdr.com/buy-rtl-sdr-dvb-t-dongles/
If you want to venture or pivot into RF, especially from software background this is the golden time that's made possible/feasible by software-defined radio (SDR) technology as mentioned in the OP article.
One very important thing that the article did not mention is the emerging and increasing popularity of physical AI [2]. RF can be the crucial enabler to to further enhance human limited sensing capabilities with EM based waveforms. A simple analogy is how the dog's powerful smelling capabilities is helping/enhancing human detection capability.
Rather than just training and inferencing on image based I/O, the physical AI now can feed on the much richer RF, mmWave, THz and LIDAR raw waveforms. The good news is that the latter processing of mmWave, THz and LIDAR, can be greatly enhanced by the former lower RF baseband (modulated information signals) that's not previously possible/feasible.
[1] Comments on "ADSY1100-Series: RF System-on-Module Assemblies":
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47821336
[2] What is physical AI?
https://www.ibm.com/think/topics/physical-ai
Hubble does the deep RF work so that firmware engineers building IoT devices never have to.
Just wondering how an LLM replaces that job …
Read this https://www.microwaves101.com/encyclopedias/where-are-they-n... and tell me how well this next big surge is going to work out any differnt.
It will actually be impossible to catch up with China on RF unless the US and Europe legislate for IP (not manufacturing!) to originate in the West. No Huawei 5G, no cheap Chinese SDN/ethernet, etc. Core switching and 5/6G edge. Remove patent protection for 5G designs.
Even as a dot point mentioning the whole WiGig -> IgniteNet thing? Is that not interesting to you?