Microwaves & RF

The future of naval operations demands technology that’s secure, adaptable, and deployment-ready. At Navy League’s Sea-Air-Space, Mercury is showing how mission-critical capability can move faster, scale smarter, and stay ahead of emerging threats.

Any sci-fi aficionado, over 40, and the many younger Trekkies, know the myriad of spun-off series and movies spawned from the immortal original Star Trek series. For this discussion, I’m referring from a metaphorical perspective to the movie The Search for Spock. I’ve been writing about 6G for several years now. Many of my ruminations revolve around the hype that’s common whenever new telecom or other technology advances bubble up to the surface.

Since its launch in 2022, the Matter connectivity standard has cemented its role as the unifying standard for IoT interoperability, ensuring devices work together across Thread, Wi-Fi, and Ethernet regardless of brand differences. Architected to solve smart-home fragmentation, the protocol now fosters intuitive consumer experiences and unlocks new commercial and industrial applications.

Master Bond EP6STC-80 is a one component, non-frozen, silver filled epoxy engineered for bonding, sealing, and coating applications requiring exceptional thermal and electrical conductivity. This system offers an unlimited working life at room temperature and achieves a full cure at a moderate temperature of 80°C. EP6STC-80 delivers exceptional thermal conductivity of 13–14 W/(m·K) and high-level electrical conductivity, with volume resistivity measuring less than 0.001 ohm-cm.

Once again, the EDGE Awards will showcase the most innovative engineering tools and industrial technologies from the prior year across 16 categories. Don’t miss this opportunity to identify your company as a leader in the design and engineering market. All submissions are reviewed and voted on by the collective engineering audience of Automation World, Control, Control Design, Electronic Design, Machine Design, Microwaves & RF and Power & Motion.

Today’s smart homes are more complex than ever before — many households now support more than 50 wireless devices. Thermostats, cameras, door locks, and appliances compete for airtime with smartphones, tablets, and gaming consoles across congested 2.4- and 5-GHz Wi-Fi bands. Overlapping networks from adjacent residences add interference and contention, reducing throughput, destabilizing connections, and increasing battery drain.

Smart-home products are rapidly evolving from single-radio nodes into dense, multi-protocol systems that must support Wi-Fi, Thread, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), and often sub-GHz or UWB within a single, highly constrained enclosure. While Matter has accelerated interoperability across ecosystems, it’s also increased the number of active radios operating within the home (Fig. 1). The result is a growing disconnect between passing protocol tests and delivering reliable RF performance in real houses.

Over the past years, the Internet of Things (IoT) has made our lives more connected and automated. Advances in connectivity, edge intelligence, and interoperability have all accelerated adoption across homes, buildings, and industrial environments, while evolving standards are helping to bring greater consistency and security to connected systems.

Access control has entered a new era. Intelligent controllers are moving decision-making from centralized servers to the edge of the network, bringing it right to the door. The result is faster performance, greater resilience, and new opportunities for customization that make access control more dynamic and adaptable than ever before. Why Edge Matters Edge computing has already transformed fields such as industrial automation and automotive design.

In pulse-mode RF systems, the power supply can make or break performance. This article explains how a pulse-optimized platform from MEAN WELL and CDI can help reduce system costs, limit droop, improve recovery, and support cleaner, repeatable pulses. Pulse-mode GaN RF transmitters can expose conventional AC/DC supplies to rail droop, slow recovery, and waveform distortion.