Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The quiet resurgence of RF engineering

atempleton.bearblog.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 160 posts

Re: The quiet resurgence of RF engineering

#41

Post by esseph »

rhave wrote: 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…

Mil is driving a lot of small and large radar development, electronic warfare weapons, RF communications, etc.

Then you have a lot of work being done on new WiFi standards, satellie antennas, cell network development, and so on.

Also companies like Tarana are building a lot of unique things.

Re: The quiet resurgence of RF engineering

#42

Post by loodish »

cactacea wrote: 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…

> Not an EE myself but honestly baffled how the author got that impression with the huge expansion of RF engineering in the consumer space -

Lots of RF devices doesn't actually mean much RF engineering.

If you want 5G connectivity almost everyone buys an integrated module. Chip, antenna, and certifications included. No serious RF engineering required, no RF engineer in the building.

Those modules designers would be purchasing their chip from one of a few companies, like Qualcomm or MediaTek. Even then most of the work isn't RF engineering, it's stitching together a product and grinding through the certifications.

Much of the innovation is done away from the consumer space where certifications are less constraining.

Re: The quiet resurgence of RF engineering

#43

Post by qazxcvbnmlp »

girvo wrote: post #35
GrumpyYoungMan wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> " ...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.

> The recent maturation of AI revealed how many people in software seemingly loathe their own profession. I always had an inkling this was the case, but man it's been depressing to see it laid so bare. So many proudly screaming "I hated programming!". Well, I don't, I love it, and have my entire life, and imagine I'll continue to as long as they will let me... More relevantly to the article and comment we're replying…

I can assure you the same thing is coming to fw and ee as well. If your in hw because you like building stuff its going to be a fun time to be alive, but there will be large chunks of engineering work that go away.

Re: The quiet resurgence of RF engineering

#44

Post by girvo »

qazxcvbnmlp wrote: post #43
girvo wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The recent maturation of AI revealed how many people in software seemingly loathe their own profession. I always had an inkling this was the case, but man it's been depressing to see it laid so bare. So many proudly screaming "I hated programming!". Well, I don't, I love it, and have my entire life, and imagine I'll continue to as long as they will let me... More relevantly to the article and comment we're replying…

I can assure you the same thing is coming to fw and ee as well. If your in hw because you like building stuff its going to be a fun time to be alive, but there will be large chunks of engineering work that go away.

Oh I'm well aware. It's lagging behind "pure" software, but is catching up.

The only thing I can see that acts as a bulwark is liability, bascially. The FW work I was doing requires a human and a large amount of careful review before acceptance. The "throw slop at the wall" that my current job is okay with won't fly there.

But there's _lots_ of FW jobs in consumer gear that is already filled with god awful slop, so maybe it won't take as long as I think.

Re: The quiet resurgence of RF engineering

#45

Post by bikelang »

GrumpyYoungMan wrote: post #28
WarmWash wrote: post #10

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.

And then there’s those of us that loved writing software and loathe what AI has reduced it to.

Re: The quiet resurgence of RF engineering

#46

Post by teleforce »

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":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47821336

[2] What is physical AI?

https://www.ibm.com/think/topics/physical-ai

Re: The quiet resurgence of RF engineering

#47

Post by WarmWash »

dublinstats wrote: post #23
uejfiweun wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The reality is that software is valued like it is hardware, but has a teeny fraction of the input costs and running costs. The government didn't have to do anything, investors naturally ran to the software "copy+paste" money printer. Build it once with only labor costs and then copy for nothing infinite times.

To build a $100M software company you need 5 capable friends and a cloud account. To build a $100M hardware company you need $500M.

Re: The quiet resurgence of RF engineering

#48

Post by UncleOxidant »

scruple wrote: post #20
WarmWash wrote: post #10

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…

I started my career in embedded at an RF company. Back then, I was 20 years junior to the next oldest guy and he was 20 years junior to the rest of the engineers. It was an incredible place to start, learning from some crusty old veterans who were pushing into retirement age. I ultimately left because the pay wasn't there. I've often thought I'd love to go back, even if it meant a decrease in pay, because the environ…

I also started in embedded development at a company where there was a significant RF component (essentially, we were doing wireless networking in 1986 - like wifi about 10 years early). All of the digital & software folks were youngish - 20s, 30s. But the RF guys were all in their 50s or older.

Re: The quiet resurgence of RF engineering

#49

Post by willis936 »

saltcured wrote: post #22
cactacea wrote: 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 s…

I'm not an RF insider, but RFSoCs and deep budgets are a thing. I don't really see this as a constraint.

If you are budget constrained then you just design your signal chain in discretes like everyone else.

Re: The quiet resurgence of RF engineering

#50

Post by mschuster91 »

girvo wrote: post #35
GrumpyYoungMan wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> " ...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.

> The recent maturation of AI revealed how many people in software seemingly loathe their own profession. I always had an inkling this was the case, but man it's been depressing to see it laid so bare. So many proudly screaming "I hated programming!". Well, I don't, I love it, and have my entire life, and imagine I'll continue to as long as they will let me... More relevantly to the article and comment we're replying…

> I always had an inkling this was the case, but man it's been depressing to see it laid so bare. So many proudly screaming "I hated programming!".

For personal stuff? Sure.

But I certainly get why people get burned out on corporate programming. It's either tedious busywork following orders designed by architects whose last time writing code was 30 years ago and they never learned anything ever since, waterfall with glaring issues that the lowest rungs are supposed to magically make go away because upper management doesn't want to reset like they're supposed to, or it's "agile" in its various abominations. There's barely any time, budget or possibility left for actually experimenting a bit or for actually crafting out stuff that works. It's all output, output, output, and being micromanaged by Jira or whatever only adds to the dissatisfaction.

Personally, I left the field for good - I'm heading towards electrical engineering. Good luck coding a robot pulling physical wires.

Post reply on HN