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The quiet resurgence of RF engineering

atempleton.bearblog.dev

21–30 of 160 posts

Re: The quiet resurgence of RF engineering

#21

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.

Do you really think that the university is going to be the bottleneck? I have to imagine that sometime in the next decade, there's going to be some big reorganization to reflect the fact that you can now learn just as well OUTSIDE of a university context. Credentials are going to become less important, standardized testing and examination far more.

> Do you really think that the university is going to be the bottleneck?

Yes. I think American society will struggle to produce enough competent electrical engineers outside of the university system.

> there's going to be some big reorganization to reflect the fact that you can now learn just as well OUTSIDE of a university context

In my experience, very few people like learning the math needed to be competent at RF. It’s hard and exhausting and without a human connection most people are going to bounce. This isn’t like software where if you get it 80% right something still occurs.

I’ve worked with homeschoolers too, and unless they’re the small fraction of people for whom math comes naturally, they’re not going to study it on their own. But that’s exactly the audience one has to reach to grow the EE supply.

Re: The quiet resurgence of RF engineering

#22
post #3

> 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…

Isn't the issue that this kind of RF is a lot like designing CPUs? There aren't many economically viable products that don't just use a COTS highly integrated circuit, so there aren't that many full on design jobs to go along with all the usage.

The product work is higher level system packaging, such as antennas and application-level manipulation of the whole RF block. But since so much is digital now, that is more software/computer architecture work rather than RF. The COTS RF circuit itself may have standardized serial or even packet interfaces to the rest of the product.

Re: The quiet resurgence of RF engineering

#23

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 fa…

These all sound like factors that make hardware a better long-term prospect to build a career around. Basically every single thing you just mentioned makes the field more resistant to automation.

I think the real deciding factor is government policy. So far they have favored software and services companies, letting them eat the lunch of the hardware producers.

Re: The quiet resurgence of RF engineering

#25
post #4

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…

Wow. Thank you.

Re: The quiet resurgence of RF engineering

#28

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 fa…

> "...stuck with hardware out of passion..."

At least you don't hate your job, I hope? The recent maturation of AI revealed how many people in software seemingly loathe their own profession.

Re: The quiet resurgence of RF engineering

#30

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 fa…

Curious if it's the same in China. We forgot how to make things, and maybe we're now forgetting how to do RF engineering. Those grey beards will retire at some point.
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