Inside Electronics

In this special episode of Electronic Design’s Inside Electronics podcast, sponsored by DigiKey and Amphenol, Guest Host David Maliniak of Microwaves & RF, speaks with James Merryman of Amphenol SV Microwave and Benjamin Pratt of Amphenol CDI about cryogenic interconnects for quantum-computing systems.

James Merryman explains that non-magnetic connectors are most critical near qubits at the refrigerator’s mixing chamber, where millikelvin temperatures and even trace ferromagnetic materials can disrupt coherence and increase error rates. Higher in the system, conventional RF materials may be acceptable.

Benjamin Pratt describes CDI’s CoreCryo, a solderless, high-density coaxial PCB interface designed with non-ferrous materials and mechanical features that withstand thermal cycling. It can extend through the refrigerator with hermetic feedthroughs, attenuation, and customized components. SV Microwave supplies complementary discrete PCB, cable, panel-mount, and feedthrough connectors, plus dense MDRF systems.

The companies offer standard eight- and 16-channel configurations, tested products, engineering models, customization, and support for scaling quantum systems.

Designed to break the economic and operational payload-to-weight barriers in vertical lift aviation, the high-stakes competition challenged teams to design lightweight aircraft capable of lifting up to four times their unladen weight. Smith and Marin share how they took the program from executive approval to execution in just eleven months, setting up a demanding 1,100-foot course at the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force to push small-scale heavy-lift innovation to its absolute limits. 

We break down the highs and the lows of the competition and some behind-the-scenes facts that you won’t get anywhere else.

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

David, Debbie, and Suma 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 Wi-Fi, 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.