Wireless technology makes remote control and communication easy—but face-to-face time still counts. So about 700 wireless and radio engineers and scientists will travel to the third annual Radio and Wireless Week to meet face to face to face. The Rosen Centre in Tampa, Fla., plays host to not one but three conferences during the week of 21 January: the IEEE Radio and Wireless Symposium, the IEEE Topical Symposium on Power Amplifiers for Wireless Communications, and the Topical Meeting on Silicon Monolithic Integrated Circuits in RF Systems.

The largest and most diverse of the week’s events is the Radio and Wireless Symposium (RWS), which this year incorporates what had been the separate IEEE Wireless and Microwave Information Systems Conference (WAMICON). Sponsored by the IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques, Communications, and Antennas and Propagation societies, the symposium is aimed at experts working on both hardware and system aspects of telecommunications, according to IEEE Fellow Afshin S. Daryoush, professor of electrical and computer engineering at Drexel University, in Philadelphia, and chair of the RWS technical program committee.

The MTT Society also sponsors the other two meetings, which are narrowly focused. The power amplifier symposium, which is more tutorial than the other two, deals with high-power systems such as power-amplifier circuits and transmitters. The IC meeting covers devices for wireless communications, specifically those built on silicon substrates, such as CMOS and silicon-germanium heterojunction bipolar transistors.

Complementing the events are exhibits of technologies and services for radio and wireless development, seven tutorial workshops, two short courses, and an informal evening session focusing on tools for designing and debugging digitally based radio signals. Separate registration is required for the symposiums, meetings, workshops, and short courses, though a discount is available to those attending all three major events.

CROSS FERTILIZATION “Plenty of conferences cover only hardware or only systems,” Daryoush says. “But a joint conference brings together both systems and hardware experts, discussing problems and cross-fertilizing ideas from both their perspectives to come up with solutions that are workable and cost-effective.” Among the topics to be covered are networks, components, signal generation and processing, antennas and signal propagation, system architecture, and optical wireless technology. Some of the hotter topics, according to Daryoush, are wideband and multiband systems; RF systems and components operating at higher frequencies and with increased bandwidth; and new wireless standards such as WiMax.

“Amplifier performance over a broad band of frequencies becomes more critical as you move from FDMA [frequency division multiple access] transmission to CDMA [code division multiple access] and on to multimedia technologies such as UWB [ultrawide band],” he points out.

With WAMICON now included in the RWS, about 100 more papers were submitted this year than last. In addition to choosing papers more selectively, the symposium’s technical program committees have restructured the technical sessions to accommodate more papers, presenting fewer long, invited papers and adding 10-minute presentations.

New topics, such as optical technology for wireless communications, have been added. Optical communication may seem out of place in a radio-oriented conference, but it is related to radio and wireless in two ways. Optical wireless, though only line-of-sight, is used in place of radio for links between satellites and buildings—and, more commonly, in infrared remote controls. “And then there’s radio on fiber,” Daryoush notes, “with optical fiber carrying radio signals over a long distance, such as from a central telephone office to a wireless base station where they can be transmitted by RF.”

For more information Radio and Wireless Week, visit http://www.radiowirelessweek.org