January 2026 Issue
The January issue of the IEEE Microwave Magazine is out! This issue gets our new year started right. We have four features on modeling and measurements, one student design competition winner and seventeen columns. Be sure to check out the Editor’s Desk first so you get a great overview of the issue. And the Guest Editor’s Desk will tell you all about the features in this issue and how they came from the 2024 Young Professionals Workshop. For now we’ll do our best to give you an overview of the issue.
The features in this issue start with GaN devices and go all the way to using neural networks for predistortion. GaN devices are well known for their traps changing their IV characteristics over time and our first feature describes using a nonlinear vector network analyzer to understand what is happening. Our second feature discusses the modeling of GaN varactors and their use in tunable matching networks. Digital predistortion is a big part of our power amplifier realization these days. Our last two features cover predistortion from frequency domain and neural network methods. Carrying on with the smart theme is our Student Design Competition winner with a smart antenna design.
We have a new MTT society president! Welcome Anding Zhu and read his first President’s Column about how microwaves impact everyone and we need to influence people as well by helping and sharing. That theme gets carried forward by our MTT-S Society News column that has begun “Ask Us Anything” workshops. Just one more opportunity to mentor. Clearly we are an international society and our Around the Globe column tells us about the Terahertz Measurement workshop at the 2025 Advanced Materials and Processes workshop held in Wuxi, China. As well as being international we are also big on our student chapters. Our MGA News column celebrates our new student branch chapter at the Jaylee Institute of Information Technology in Noida, India. And check out all that has been happening at the San Francisco and Santa Clara Valley chapters in our Featured MTT-S Chapters column. We have certainly appreciated the contributions and mentoring of our women in microwaves. The Women in Microwaves column this month shares a very cool new logo and information on this community’s impact on our society. Our last society based column in this issue is the In Memoriam column for Vladimir Gelnovatch. Please read it and learn about this Life Fellow and his contributions to our society.
We also have many columns that are more about thinking and similar to the discussions we have during the evening hours of each conference. This month’s MicroBusiness column takes a look at AI: the good, the bad, and the ugly. Check it out. Microwave Surfing is another good column for expanding our brains. Learn about how fish can navigate using the earth’s magnetic field and how easy it is to jam GPS. If you read our magazine regularly you know just how candid our Health Matters column is. In this month’s column we learn a bit about fifty years of studying the impacts of RF and microwave radiation on health and how thyroid cancer has been increasing. Remember books? Our Book/Software Reviews column has a look at a book that looks at charge acceleration, antennas and scatterers but really is about understanding electromagnetics. This month’s issue also has a New Products column. Take some time to learn about 1550nm photodiodes, XBAR technology and broadband conical inductors to 110 GHz. Our Speaker’s Corner has always been a great column for enabling discussion. This month’s Speaker’s Corner looks at sustainable electronics and microwaves. Finally, we have an Enigmas, etc. and a look at an asymmetric inductive coupler.
As always, please check out the Conference Column. Being there in person is a better experience.
Summary by Alfy Riddle, PhD
Quanergy Solutions