Inside Electronics

In this special episode of Electronic Design’s Inside Electronics, sponsored by DigiKey and Qorvo, Guest Host David Maliniak of Microwaves & RF, speaks with Qorvo General Manager Debbie Gibson and Principal Product Manager Suma Kapilavai about RF design for drones.

Debbie Gibson emphasizes that size, weight, power, cost, and development speed—SWAP-C—must be balanced together rather than treated as separate priorities. Suma Kapilavai explains that software-defined radios favor wideband RF front ends, which simplify operation across broad frequency ranges and allow platforms to evolve without complete redesigns. Narrowband approaches remain useful when licensed-spectrum rules, nearby-band interference, or filtering needs demand tight frequency control.

The guests discuss SDR challenges, including achieving broadband performance, linearity, efficiency, and signal integrity among multiple onboard radios. They note that off-the-shelf modular components reduce schedule and technical risk by adapting proven technologies from WiFi, infrastructure, mobile, and defense applications.

Looking ahead, greater range, data capacity, drone swarms, AI integration, mesh networking, EMI control, and satellite communications will intensify RF tradeoffs.

Simulations abound in designing everything from aircraft to chiplet-based system-on-chips (SoC). It is too expensive to live by trial-and-error but simulations can require lots of time and hardware to let the software return the final evaluation. In this episode of Inside Electronics, co-host Bill Wong talks with Vinci’s CEO, Hardik Kabaria, about how his company's solutions can speed up physical simulations by a factor of 1000 using AI techniques.

Currently, AI and edge computing are hitting a wall when it comes to power budgets, latency, and cloud dependence, hindering real-world deployments. This issue is complicated by the need to integrate a great deal of input from sensors and other devices. In this episode, we talk to Sumeet Kumar, co-founder & CEO of Innatera, about the state of the AI industry and the company’s spiking neural network technology.

In this episode of Inside Electronics, host Alix Paultre interviews Jeff Kring, Product Manager for Integrated Connector Modules at Bel, about Ethernet’s evolution. They discuss Base-T Ethernet’s ubiquity, how Power over Ethernet has extended its life, and the roles of cabling standards and IEEE speed standards.

Kring explains why 2.5G and 5G emerged as practical “fill-in” speeds that let buildings with Cat5e and Cat6 cabling gain more bandwidth without costly rewiring. He also covers PoE’s growing power needs for Wi-Fi base stations and security cameras, the importance of magnetics qualification, and how reference designs help ensure performance, emissions compliance, and interoperability.

The conversation closes with a look at future speeds like 25G and 40G Base-T, which exist as standards but lack market-ready chips.

In this episode, two of our editors, Bill Wong and Alix Paultre, discuss the current AI ecosystem and some of the issues involved in its expansion into the engineering community. They will also talk about some of the new AI-driven design tools available.