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It all depends upon your personality traits. Are you interested in details or the broad view? Do you like working with equations? Do you like getting inspired for flashes of insight?
My general suggestions is that you should work in an area that you would have done for free as a hobby. You will enjoy it for the 45 years you work in it. If you take a job just for the pay or status you will be so miserable that the extra pay goes into holidays to recover from the misery.
My favorite is circuit design. Transistor amplifiers, microwave filters. My next favorite is system analysis link budgets. My least favorite is endless measurements to make sure my circuit will work okay.
I'm now working in microstrip antenna desingning,and i feel the microstrip devices are my hobby! But ,i'm puzzled if it is easy from antenna desingning to the other device's ?What work i should do to ready?
I agree with Flatulent, you should really like very much what you do or you will after some time need to change. Microwaves are, as most of the hot engineering subject, the art of solving various problems. If you are chalenged with this, you are on the right track. If you are terrified when having problems, go for another profession!
There is a strong belief that since the RFICs and MMICs are so cheep and easy to use, there will be no job for microwave designers. Have you really try some MMIC? Some of them work OK for you becouse you are using them exactly as they are planned to be used (same frequencies, power levels, substrates, temperatures etc.). Sometimes you have to modify the working conditions just slightly and the circuit will simply not work as expected!
Some of MMICs/RFICs will never ever show the performances declared by the manufacturer, no matter how hard you try. The typical values from datasheets are sometimes far to be typical. I had personal experience with a 1W MMIC amplifier that was working perfectly for 3-5 seconds and that will burn itself. The company that was manufacturing it become bankrupt after 6 months.
Sometimes you will find everything working well in an evaluation PCB that is 5x5cm for a MMIC chip having 3x3mm. Try shrinking the board or moving from microstrip to CPW. You are sometimes need a PhD to make this step! If you are bying 1 milion pieces or similar quantities of component a manufacturer might help, but are you buing that much?
These are just a few of examples that I had experienced, can give much more. So, after all I am not worried, there will always be a lot of jobs for RF/microwave engineers. The amount of problems solved by RFIC/MMICs is proportional to problems arise from their applications/adaptations. Anyway, the technology is going forward but the requirements/specifications are the ones that are really pushing the whole thing forward. The more solved problems you have in MMICs, the more complex applications you want to create.
Finally, RFICs and MMICS are made by engineers as well, foundries are now available to wide engineering public and are not a black art any more. So, we might all end up making MMICs?
i think the most important thing is learn at your free time
something sames not about your curent work may be usefully for your later work and there is not anywork is for a lifetime if you don't learn
RF/Microwave engineers will never run out of job, so long as the power-area issue cannot be resolved in IC technology. Ever heard of KiloWatt power IC? True that ADC /DAC are getting faster and faster (in clock), but for the state of art technology ( eg missile radar guidance frontend, whereby large dynamic range, low NF and hugh transmit power are common spec), many still are using MIC design or at most MMIC.
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but for one ,it is the mission impossible.
