what is the future of RF engineers?

rf engineers future

I am a design engineer with 5 years RF/IF design experience and another 5 years experience with digital receiver, FPGA design. Now, i want to know how the future of a RF engineer is?

what future of rf

The RF field is hard to enter and you'll have a brilliant future.

demand for rf engineers

if you can learn more theory but only the design, the future is bright

Future depends on the market demand; the place you work and live.

Hi

As you know, today fast conversion high resolution ADCs are common to use. today almost every IF part of a receiver is implemented using IF Sampling techniques. So IF engineers works change to Digital Signal Processing. But IF Chip Designers should designes High Bandwidth High Resolution Low Cost ADCs.
And About RF, i think we will see aday which we use ADCs to sample RF input. So RF Chip designers should use RF considerations in designing a High Bandwidth ADCs, not in "routing" a PCB. This issue is correct about receiver part but transmitter part problem such as designing a high performance power amp still remain.

Regards

There are fundamental limitations on the spur levels of ADCs. This will prevent their being used for sampling directly the wide band spectrum at the antenna except for some specialized uses. Also the sampling time jitter produces phase noise. Sampling at RF will make it much larger than sampling at IF.

for low power/low range transcievers, market trand is more integration, more linearity and more efficiency for transmitters in GHz frequencies (2.5 or 5) for recievers there is several challenges due to low phase noise requirement of the systems and wide band IF that reqires new architectures for reciever chain and more digital processing power.
for high power systems like broadcasting applications there is not several news and the 80's technology is sufficient.
future depends on IT and for it high speed back-bone is necessary through fiber optics or sattelite and DSL or something like them and this system require high degree of integration (IC)so it seems that Microwave frequency is pushed toward higher frequencies(over 10 GHz) and lower frequencies is used for Integrated circuits!

BEST!