IMS 2025 Wrap-Up
July 2025
Someone must be working out in order to lift that huge letter M... and what's with the lobster on the badge?
The IMS 2025 Exhibit was held June 17-19 at Moscone Center in San Francisco. Thanks to all who stopped by our modest booth!
It's been a minute since we attended any of the technical talks at IMS. When you are on Social Security and did not yet save an eight-digit retirement fund, there are lots of other ways to spend your disposable income, like buying a 3,200 square-foot warehouse, building a 700 square-foot house in your backyard, owning a classic car, or a buying a new Yamaha U3 upright. But here at Microwaves101, we have friends who attended sessions and told us all about them. We have been informed that the best industry paper was awarded to:
Jeff Dykstra, Jan-Luc Erb, Waleed Asadi, Brian Hash, Yuji Mitsui, Nabil El-Hinnawy, Greg Slovin, David Howard, Rodd Novak and Eric Shapiro, "A Low-Loss, Wideband, 0-110 GHz SPDT Using PCM RF Switches with Integrated CMOS Drivers", affiliated with pSemi Corp and Tower Semiconductor. We have been fans of PCM switches for years, and thanks to our Microwave Brother Nabil we have a page that describes this technology. Bravo to all!
This year the exhibits were well-attended, although we don't have exact numbers. We did notice that there were fewer Chinese suppliers. Who can blame them for staying home when tariffs appear to change daily? We chatted with people from lots of other countries, though, including first-time vendor Trace-Tec from Vietnam. They do circuit board fabrication in case you were wondering.
It was not that long ago that Chinese companies started exhibiting at IMS, and if not for the tariff situation they would have had a big footprint this year. We are fans of free trade, up until intellectual property theft occurs, or ITAR regulations are broken. We welcome our new Vietnam friends! Here is a swag bag we picked up from their booth.
And here is the recognition of a company that is a first-time exhibitor. Bravo!
Here's a big, shiny booth for Aaronia AG from Germany. Kind of opposite of the Microwaves101 booth style.
This test set-up caught our eye, it is an ancient HP 8720B 20 GHz network analyzer that monitors performance changes on a set of cables that are continuously flexed. If it ain't broke, don't fix it!
We are sometimes amused by company names, especially if they belong in Urban Dictionary. "BytePipe" checks that box.
The IMS reception was at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and we cannot remember an IMS party that had as much free food and drinks. It was awesome. Below is one of Alexander Calder's mobiles on display, a media he invented.
Calder has special significance for me as we are both alumni from Stevens Tech, graduating 65 years apart. One of his biggest mobiles was a gift to the Stevens library in 1970, on the occasion of Stevens 100th anniversary.
In addition to the Industry sponsored event, various suppliers handed our free drinks. You'd think that Miller MMIC would have supplied Miller beer, but although I did not partake, I heard they were serving Coors light.
You may be wondering, what did Microwaves101 have to offer? Of course we had pens and our little pads of graph paper (we've had them before). What the heck is wrong with what's left of that dude's hair?
Because the exhibition happened to extend to June 19th, we also had some flags and info packets about the Juneteenth holiday which occurs on that date. Juneteenth is a federally-recognized United States holiday that commemorates the day in 1865 that formerly enslaved people in Texas learned that they had been legally freed some two years earlier. Juneteenth commemorates the struggles and achievements of African Americans that often continue today. In support, we put up a page Celebrating Black Engineers throughout history. It's the Real McCoy!
It's always great to schmooze with microwave celebrities, particularly when they don't carry a lot of ego baggage. Sanjay Raman was once a program manager at Darpa Microsystems Technology Office, and is currently Dean of Engineering at UMass Amherst. Here he is pictured with two UMass alums at the WIM event. Zoya Popovic is also in the picture, it is tough to determine who has higher microwave cachet between her and Sanjay. We will stay neutral on this... what's with that United Tool and Stamping shirt, is someone making a career change? Nah, it's just another free shirt from a friend, not quite warm enough for San Francisco evenings.
This was the coolest booth on the floor. Schmid & Partner Engineering AG (SPEAG) was demoing their DASY8 system. Did you ever wonder how much RF your body absorbs from devices? From the SPEAG website:
DASY8 Module SAR / APD is optimized for demonstration of compliance with local and whole-body specific absorption rate (SAR) limits from 4 MHz to 10 GHz and the absorbed power density (APD) from 6 GHz to 10 GHz based on SAR measurements. The module scans the field in the entire or in a sub-volume of a phantom filled with tissue simulating liquid and determines the peak spatial SAR directly without any approximation. It is the most accurate SAR tool available on the market and considered as the gold standard in compliance testing.
We didn't spend a lot of time lookig for IMS swag, but all of the items below were distributed at the MTT-S booth. Smith Chart socks now appear on our page of Smith Chart tributes, These will soon will be worn by a migrant we are hiding from ICE. Just checking to see if anyone is reading this!
We updated our stuffies of IMS page to include the lobsters, and a new tiger from Samtech. We also acquired a "date finder" from Q microwave and posted it to our old school tools page.
San Francisco is one of the cities where Waymo is rolling out driverless cabs. We didn't try it. But we note that Waymo uses actual radar (among other sensors), unlike competitor Tesla (primarily a vision system).
No trip to San Fran should omit a cable car ride. This one went right past our hotel.
For the next level experience, you should visit the cable car power house. Here you can see 150 year-old technology employed today, and it's a beautiful thing.
Check out the Unknown Editor's amazing archives when you are looking for a way to screw off for a couple of hours or more!
Fan/hate mail can always be sent to UE@microwaves101.com