IEEE Microwave Magazine - October 2016 - 85

IMS2016 Steering Committee and chair
of the MTT-S Education Committee,
I have fully supported these initiatives. Dr. Amarpal Khanna, IMS2016
general chair, and Dr. Steven Rosenau,
IMS2016 TPC chair, tasked me with
developing criteria for microwave/RF
practice papers and the Best Industry
Paper selection. This effort resulted in
the nomination of 28 papers through
an extensive review process considering best engineering practice contributions, with ten of these being from
industry. On behalf of the IMS2016
Steering Committee, I would like to
congratulate the authors of all nominated papers and, in particular, those
of the two papers (a tie) selected for
the IMS2016 Best Industry Paper award
(Figures 1 and 2).

Nomination Criteria
and Selection
A pilot project was launched at IMS2014
in collaboration with then TPC chair, Dr.
Sanjay Raman, to attract participation
and contributions of practicing microwave/RF professionals working on the
front end of complex multidisciplinary
systems and applications in which RF and
microwave technologies and techniques

play a critical role. The resulting focus
session, "Advances in Microwave Practice: Tunable Antennas and System
Front Ends," highlighted the role of
microwave and RF engineering in the
realization of complex applications and
systems. The session was well received
and very successful.
However, the lack of written criteria
presented a problem in carrying the
concept forward. Therefore, for IMS2016,
the following criteria (developed in collaboration with IMS2016 TPC Chair
Steven Rosenau and his committee)
were adopted to identify the advanced
microwave/RF practice papers:
A paper on advanced practices
describes an innovative microwave/RF design, integration
technique, process enhancement,
and/or combination thereof that
results in significant improvements in performance and/or in
time to production for RF/microwave components, subsystems
or systems.
In addition, the IMS2016 TPC announced
its intention to present a Best Industry
Paper award at the IMS2016 closing ceremony, with the following additional criteria established for this selection:

A microwave/RF innovation of
a product or system application
that potentially has the highest
impact on a RF/ microwave product and/or system which will significantly benefit the microwave
community and society at large.
These criteria were communicated
to the more than 30 Technical Program
Review Committee (TPRC) subcommittees, which evaluated all the submitted papers through a double-blind
review process. Each subcommittee,
representing the full scope of diverse
research areas covered at the IMS,
nominated deserving papers according
to the outlined criteria. Because of the
double-blind review process, they did
not know whether papers originated
from academia, industry, or other research institutions. The origin of the
nominated papers was sorted out later
by the IMS2016 TPC.

Microwave and RF Advanced
Practice Paper Nominations
A total of 28 papers were nominated
by the TPRC during the paper re view
and selection process at its January
2016 meeting. It is interesting to note that
14 (50%) of these nominated papers

Table 2. The ten IMS2016 best Industry Paper award nominees.
Paper Title

Lead Company/Organization

Lead Author/Speaker

"Design and Performance of 16-40-GHz GaN Distributed Power
Amplifier MMICs Utilizing an Advanced 0.15-um GaN Process"

QORVO, Inc.

Charles Campbell

"Selectivity-Enhanced Glucose Measurement in Multicomponent
Aqueous Solution by Broadband Dielectric Spectroscopy"

Nippon Telegraph and Telephone
Corporation

Masahito Nakamura

"An S-Band 240-W Output/54% PAE GaN Power Amplifier
with Broadband Output Matching Network for Both
Fundamental and Second Harmonic Frequencies"

Mitsubishi Electric Corporation

Takaaki Yoshioka

"Compact Triple-Band Bandpass Filters Using Rectangular
Waveguide Resonators"

Honeywell COM DEV International,
Ltd.

Li Zhu

"Demonstration of 20-Gb/s Wireless Data Transmission
at 300 GHz for KIOSK Instant Data Downloading Applications
with InP MMICs" (winner)

NTT Device Technology Labs

Hiroshi Hamada

"Low-Loss and High-Isolation Techniques for High-Power RF
Acoustic Devices"

Taiyo Yuden Company, Ltd.

Masanori Ueda

"A Fully Integrated Ka-Band Front End for 5G Transceivers"

Samsung Research America

Jeffery Curtis

"7-kW GaN W-Band Transmitter" (winner)

Raytheon Company

Kenneth Brown

"A Frequency-Synchronization Scheme for Time-Varying
Doppler-Shift Compensation Using the Direct Return Signal"

Mitsubishi Electric Corporation

Keisuke Nakamura

"37-W, 75-100-GHz GaN Power Amplifier"

QuinStar Technology, Inc.

James Schellenberger

October 2016

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