In the December 2010 issue of Microwave Product Digest (MPD), they ran a series of articles called “View from the Top” in which a cross-section of RF/Microwave industry executives were asked to comment on the current state of the business environment. Seeing as how MPD never called me for such an interview, I am graciously submitting my (slightly modified) version of the Q&A, since these are all topics I have either touched upon in the past, or have intended to address on this blog. Enjoy…

1.    What is your assessment of the currently global economic situation? How has your business fared through the economic downturn, and how do you see your business, and the industry as a whole, going forward?

In 2008 and 2009, it was evident that debt-free companies with strong cash flow would perform well while overly leveraged companies would face severe consequences. Our belief was that companies with strong manufacturing capabilities and a commitment to technological innovation would eventually benefit from the downturn since. At that time, Marki Microwave invested heavily in developing new product lines, both as a way of diversifying our revenue streams, and as a way of increasing our technological acumen. Our R&D efforts during the global Recession proved well advised because we have enjoyed more than 100% year-over-year growth in all three of our new product lines including Couplers, Filters and Power Dividers. We actually experienced an excellent 2010 on account of these new product lines, and the continued adoption of our high performance T3 mixer line. By many accounts, we are not alone in believing that the RF and Microwave industry is very active currently, and that there are many opportunities for many exciting technologies in 2011. We believe that small  companies with experience and specialized expertise will continue to prosper in an industry thirsty for technological advances. Let’s put it this way: I just finished writing Marki’s R&D timeline for 2011, and I can’t wait to announce the kinds of new gadgets and gizmos we have on the fire.

2.    How have social networking websites impacted your business? Do you believe that online communities like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook have a meaningful place in the RF/Microwave industry?

For an industry rife with scientific experts and technological sophistication, we are incredibly old-fashioned. Compared to other industries, we are one of the most conservative, and this translates into being slow adopters of new technology. For example, our company still sells a mixer my father designed in 1975, simply because the customer refuses to adopt the newer, better version. I understand that “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”, but sometimes change is good.

Since the day I began working at Marki, I have had the strong opinion that the internet is the single most important ally for our small business. For this reason, Marki cut back significantly on print advertising and the other “traditional” marketing tools. It is not that they don’t work, we simply believe that Marketing dollars and time are more efficiently spent on tools like Adwords and, obviously, online blogs. If I had the budget to advertise on every other page in the Journal I would, but not all us have the privilege. Therefore, Marki Microwave openly embraces all the social networking (marketing) forums, and we work hard to make this participation meaningful for our customers.

Make no mistake, though, the industry as a whole has been slow to adopt forums like Twitter and Facebook and the jury is still out on how the average RF engineer will use these avenues going forward. I would argue, however, that we are at the beginning of a very long adoption curve, so this will be a multi-year trend. To use a (poor) photonics analogy, the process will look less like stimulated emission of a photon and more like spontaneous emission of a photon—we can’t really control when, where or at what wavelength the photon will be emitted, we just know that over some measurable amount of time, the photon will eventually emit (our LED friends an CREE will appreciate that one). Look at the way the internet changed the way RF engineers design: vendors used to have pay sales reps in all the key geographic locations to, literally, walk into a customer’s building to hand them a (gasp!) printed catalog. Now, the customer goes online to find the most up to date information and has the option to request a quote within seconds. Advertising has followed a similar path, and it is no surprise that all of our trade journals are skinnier than they used to be. Don’t misunderstand, I still greatly enjoy trade journals and read them religiously, I am simply stating that we have more options today that go far beyond traditional print. We no longer have to publish papers in journals or in our printed catalogs, we simply post them online for all to freely download. And do you know how we announce these new papers and application notes to the industry? By posting about them on the Marki Microwave Twitter, Facebook, and blog websites. I encourage any and all of our customers, partners and readers to join us on the websites. This industry will look significantly different in 5 years, and Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and (possibly) RFblogger will have something to do with it.

3.    Many have argued that there is a shortage of RF/Microwave engineers. How do you see this problem unfolding in the short and long term, both as it pertains to your own business, and the industry as a whole?

The shortage of good RF engineers is a major problem. Forget about the RF industry, the shortage of American engineers is a major problem. Out of the 20 or so close friends I graduated with in undergrad in 2002, only 3 were engineers. Of those 3, I am the only practicing engineer. The other two jumped ship and went the MBA route. It seems that the engineering discipline is either too boring, too hard, or too unprofitable for most Americans.   I think it is all of the above.

In the near term, I doubt we will see significant fallout from this shortage on an industry or national level. The larger problem involves what will happen when all the engineers from my father’s generation retire in the coming 5 to 10 years. My father and  I talk to many companies, and we hear constantly that many larger RF/Microwave companies are forced to reconnect with former, retired employees in order to finish projects because the expertise is not passed on to the younger generation. Eventually, these RF wizards will not be around to bail us out and the entire industry will suffer as a result. It is essential that the companies in our industry pass on this engineering expertise to the next generation of engineers. At Marki Microwave, we have a clear chain of succession, and we pride ourselves of passing on all the hard-fought knowledge to our engineers. However, there are other, especially small, companies in the industry who are in danger of losing their technological edge if the founder’s expertise is not passed on. I hope that engineers in my generation surface in the next decade that can carry the torch of our predecessors. Currently, I am looking to hire such people, and I can testify that it is a difficult process.

4.    As a small business and an entrepreneur, what advice would you give to an RF/Microwave engineer looking to start a company?

Know what you are good at, know what you are not good at. Avoid the tendency of over-engineering your first generation of products. Give your customers what they want, not what you think they want. Don’t assume an idea is bad just because you think it is obvious. Don’t assume and idea is good just because it is devilishly complicated. Be patient, it usually takes 1 to 2 years before a new product becomes adopted by the industry….I could go on and on….

5.    What do you perceive as the hottest markets for the RF industry for the coming year?

If we are to use the stock market as a predictive tool, then the fiber optics market is set to explode in 2011. Granted, we have been waiting for this to happen for over a decade, but the smart phone/streaming Netflix era has consumed the available bandwidth, and people who make fiber optic hardware are finally going to make some money because of this. (Go look at JDSU or Finisar stock if you don’t believe me). I happen to agree with this premise, but I also believe that such speculation is always tenuous: the technical challenges tend to require state-of-the-art technology, but the customers demand commodity prices…that is a recipe for disaster if you actually want to make a profit. I have personally witnessed millions in venture capital be wasted because of these paradoxical requirements.

From a communication theory perspective, we are in the process of improving the spectral efficiency of optical fiber. Legacy systems usually use 10 Gb/s on-off keying to transmit data. This is Stone-Age technology compared to what we use in cell phones. Using the wireless industry as inspiration, photonics companies began solving the spectral efficiency problem. From what I understand, the price points and bandwidth demand are now justifying the network upgrades. Food for thought: I was told by a very reliable source that the pain is going to get worse (in terms of the network bandwidth shortage). If one looks at the exponential increase in required network bandwidth over the next decade and compares it to the average power consumption of running the servers, one finds that within the next decade or so, the fiber optic network will consume more power than the United States can produce, given current energy grid capacity projections. In other words, the US energy grid will not be able to support the optical network power consumption per bit. If I were a betting man, I’d say it is time to invest in technologies that will significantly lower the energy/bit in optical networking hardware, it is the only reasonable options since the energy grid capacity cannot be improved at a reasonable pace. If history is a guide, that means that the solution will come out of the electronics domain, not the optics domain. Take it from a former optics guy; electronics always wins.

So you’re thinking about getting a Masters of Ph.D. in engineering or science? Well, if you’re like I was, then you have heard a lot of rumors about what the whole process is about, and what you can expect out of it. In my experience, the advice floating through the halls of undergraduate universities and companies can be suspect at best, and misleading at worst. Having gone through the graduate school process recently, I would like to offer a little clarity on this oft-deliberated question. Today we are going to talk about grad school: Fact or Fiction.

The Ph.D. is just a longer version of a Masters—Fiction

Both are important, but for different reasons. In my view, the Masters degree acts as a form of continuing education for the undergraduate degree. Basically, a Masters builds on the foundation of the generalized undergrad education to give a deeper level of understanding for more current topics. The Ph.D. involves the coursework aspects of the Masters, but eventually sends the student onto a metaphorical “intellectual island” to fend for themselves in the grueling world of academic research. In order the get a Ph.D., the student is expected to make new scientific contributions to the field and publish papers in peer-reviewed journals/conferences. The Masters student can do this, but is not usually required.

Graduate courses are much more interesting than undergrad courses—Fact

Undergrad courses are boring, the problem sets are excruciating, and the grading is cut-throat. I believe this pain is intended so as to (high pass) filter the weaker students. The good news is that graduate courses are more interesting because you learn more the most modern topics and many courses are taught by the experts who are actually pushing the field to new heights—this latter fact implies that the professors tend to enjoy teaching the higher level courses, which always makes for better lectures.

Graduate courses are very difficult—Fiction

In my experience, exams and grading are much more difficult in undergraduate courses. Professors tend to treat the graduate students much more benevolently.

The Ph.D. is a waste of time—Fiction

Surprisingly, many people believe that a Ph.D. is not worth the time expense. Arguments often include the “opportunity cost” of the Ph.D.—this is the income “lost” by not working in a “real” job during those 4 or 5 years, the fact that you work on a single problem for so long and become too narrowly focuses, and the fact that you do not gain real world experience. For me, these are all red herring arguments.

First, most science Ph.D. programs pay their students monthly stipends for the work, or for TA-ing. It is not a lot of money, but it is a living wage, and not egregiously lower than an entry-level engineer with a BS. Most people in their twenties don’t have a high cost a living, anyway.

Second, while it is true that a Ph.D. covers a narrow list of topics, the breadth of knowledge required is immense. For every paper you write in grad school, I’d estimate you read hundreds of reference papers just to appreciate the “shoulders of the giants” you are standing on. After 5 years of grad school, I would guess I had read literally thousands of IEEE and OSA papers. To me, that is the opposite of being narrowly focused.

Finally, the argument that the Ph.D. process is an incubator that does not teach real world experience is horribly misled. Have you ever witnessed the political cattiness of rival professors? If not, I assure you it would make for some amazing reality TV. Just as any corporate job requires you to be aware of the politics of the office, and the inter-personal relationships of the people in your team, the Ph.D. requires you to understand that the academic process, and research in general, is a dog-eat-dog world. Make no mistake, when it comes to University level research, careers and millions of dollars are at stake, and any Ph.D. candidate can testify to this fact…tell me that’s not “real world”.

When you graduate with a Ph.D., people will respect you more—Fiction

I often tell people, “the only people who call me Dr. Marki are the ones who don’t know me.” Translation: your friends, family and colleagues couldn’t care less about the Ph.D.—I think that is a GOOD thing.

You can choose a school with a great program, or you can choose where you want to live, but not both—Mostly Fact

When I applied to grad school, I had one criterion: get back to California. Essentially, I spammed every California-based EE/ECE program I could find. I lucked out with UCSD, because San Diego is the greatest city in the country—I defy you to prove otherwise. Nevertheless, my optics professors at Duke kept telling me about the University of Rochester, because the school is well known for groundbreaking optics research. You know what I did? Ignored them. This west coast boy can’t take those upstate winters. Being from California, I was lucky because we have so many great engineering programs from which to choose, but in general, that is the exception to the rule. It is very difficult decide where you want to live, and then successfully matriculate to the perfect graduate program. You get to pick program, or location, but not both.

Besides your spouse, your Thesis Advisor is the most important personal relationship you will ever choose—Fact

This was great advice given to me by my own thesis advisor during orientation. Your thesis advisor is something akin to an adopted parent who can fire you. Choose wisely.

Your thesis topic does not matter, only that you finish—Fiction

Many people believe that your thesis topic does not matter because you will never actually work in that field after you graduate. I would be an example of one of those people, my thesis has little to do with RF/microwave engineering. However, I have come to find that the people who actually work in a field similar to their thesis often have an advantage, especially when they start companies. Jason Breitbarth at Holzworth is a prime example. Jason did his thesis work in phase noise at UC Boulder and now owns a company building low phase noise equipment. This is not surprising, building an engineering company requires unique expertise and insight that can be productized, the Ph.D. process helps you acquire such knowledge and this can help tremendously when creating new companies.

The Ivory Tower is much different from the real world—Fact

Yes, grad school teaches you real world experiences, but it is not the real world. In the real world, people don’t care nearly as much about science. This fact was very hard for me to accept when I first stepped out of UCSD and into the halls of Marki Microwave. When you are doing your Masters or Ph.D., everyone clearly cares about doing good work, exploring new areas of science or engineering, and competing for the admiration of their colleagues. In the real world, engineering or scientific achievements are often tempered by budgets, due dates, supply chain issues, economic uncertainty and office malaise. This is the inevitable trade-off when weighing whether to go to grad school: you can choose “scientific utopia” for a few years at the expense of lower pay and fierce competition, or you can choose higher pay and higher quality of life but having to accept that your contributions will often be muted by factors well beyond your control, but not both. For me, experiencing the Ivory Tower for a few years was well worth this trade.

Your thesis committee will not read your thesis—Fact

Shocking, but true! When you defend your thesis, at least one committee member will be late (they are on “professor time”, after all), at least one committee member will be checking his email, and at least one committee member will be cracking open your dissertation for the very first time. I am not kidding. The fact is that by the time you publish 3 or 4 papers in your field, you know more about the area that any of your committee members, so their job isn’t to check your work line by line, but to ensure that the work was done with a high degree scientific integrity. Good professors gain a profound intuition into the scientific process; its almost like they can smell good or bad work, without actually knowing the details.

The only people that will ever read your thesis are in your lab group—Fact

Your mom or spouse might give it a go, but they won’t get past the first few pages (unless they have a degree in your field). My thesis is posted on the Marki Microwave website, and I strongly doubt anyone has read it in firm detail.

You will sink, or you will swim—Fact

Yep.

Now that the year is winding down and we are feverishly completing our final shipments for 2010, it is time to look back and see what we accomplished over the last 300+ days. By most accounts, 2010 seems to have been a very good year for the RF/microwave industry. While it is true that Marki Microwave is a small player in a very big and diverse industry, I feel that my particular vantage point gives me some insight into what we are seeing both economically and technologically. I want to talk about some of the trends I have been seeing, and how Marki has been able to take advantage of a few of them. Since Marki is a private company, this is just about as close to an investor conference call as it gets for us, but I would imagine that much of what I say will be true for the big boys in the industry like Hittite and Triquint and Avago.

Trends

Broadband, broadband, broadband

I am obsessed with bandwidth, and I’m glad to see that the industry is too. Since Marki specializes in broadband components such as mixers, couplers and power dividers, I am always excited when a customer comes along and needs a power divider from 1 to 65 GHz, or a mixer from 10 MHz to 12 GHz (T3-12) . Interestingly, we have witnessed a very strong push this year from customers with very large bandwidth requirements. I believe this is coming from several trends. First, RF designers are finding that it is cheaper (and more elegant) to design a system with a few expensive, very broadband components than a lot of cheap, narrowband components. Many of our customers have gravitated towards our T3 mixers for this reason; they find that they can avoid investing in extra mixers, switches and amplifiers by using a single mixer that can cover the whole band and can be used with a flexible LO drive. Yes, the T3 might be 5x the cost, but they have purchased 10x less parts, and this translates to quicker design turn around and a lower risk of failure during board integration. This insatiable need for bandwidth is strongest in the test equipment and surveillance area and if anything, the demand is increasing. Another trend pushing the need for bandwidth is flexibility. In my opinion, the wireless area is over-populated with commodity components. While this is good for making your iPhone inexpensive, it is generally bad for military-type folks who need to communicate far away from the overpopulated low-GHz bands. I went to MilCom in San Jose a few months ago, and the JTRS radio was the big hit. One of the key benefits of this radio is its ability to work over a multitude of bands with untold numbers of modulation formats. Simple commercial components designed for the wireless industry do not satisfy such requirements, in part because they are designed with cost in mind, not flexibility in performance and application. Many customers call me nowadays with these flexible bandwidth requirements in mind, I expect it to continue into 2011.

High power and high linearity

If you are like me, you are sick of hearing about high power amplifiers, or PA’s for those who have been living under a rock. I estimate is that there are about 3,649 companies marketing themselves as PA experts, and apparently there is enough business to go around. OK, I am exaggerating, but PA’s seem to be the soup-du-jour (that’s the soup of the day for you ‘Dumb and Dumber’ fans). As a general trend, however, we do see that people are very concerned with the science of high power RF signals, and the components that can perform well at these powers. For Marki, we have enjoyed this push in the form of our high linearity mixers, yep, the T3’s again. I have written an app note about the T3’s, these mixers are amazing and offer the high IP3 and 1 dB compression in the industry. I am also seeing many inquiries for higher power couplers and combiner/splitters. I have put this on the To Do list for 2011.Why the need for more power and more linearity? There is no single answer to this question. In truth, the push for power and linearity stems from both commercial and military applications, alike. The “sexiness” of PA’s is explained by the fact that people want to transmit more power more efficiently for less cost. Hence, you see all those articles in the journals about GaN, GaAs, Triquint, Cree, PAE, etc. The quest for linearity stems from the trend of employing complex modulation formats to push more data down the pipe and the need for higher dynamic range systems. Components that can achieve better linearity performance through metrics like 1 dB compression, spurious response, and two-tone intercept all cater to these modern systems.

Surface mount to higher frequencies

There is a saying in the field, “the money’s in the packaging”. The modern incarnation of this trend is that components makers are being pressed more and more to offer higher frequency surface mount packages for their products. At Marki, we are unique in the fact that we are the only hybrid mixer maker that offers surface mount packaging beyond a few GHz. As opposed to GaAs mixers and LTCC mixers, hybrid mixers are challenging to make surface mount because they require suspended substrates that must float physically far away from ground. This poses a challenge for the packaging because the signal must therefore travel a long distance vertically before entering the circuitry. Marki solved this problem by building a 50 Ohm transmission line directly into the side of the metal carrier. We call this our ‘EZ’ package and is offered for mixers up to about 30 GHz. Amazingly, I have been getting calls over the past year where people want to go to even higher surface mount frequencies beyond 10 or 20 GHz. This trend is justified because surface mount assemblies are lighter and smaller (and cheaper if done correctly), but the designers still have many challenges to overcome. For one thing, surface mount assemblies to 40 GHz, for example, require an expert-level understanding of microwave packaging science and mechanical layout/design. In other words, even if the manufacturer can provide the components to 40 GHz, the system level assembly is still going to be a big headache. The mistake I have witnessed is when people underestimate the difficulty in building surface mount assemblies above 20 GHz or so; it is full of pitfalls and requires an experienced hand. Nevertheless, the trend continues, and I don’t imagine it is going to fade.