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Why RF Coexistence Testing Is Critical for Shared Spectrum
A comprehensive review of how spectrum congestion, dynamic sharing, and cognitive radio systems are reshaping RF coexistence testing for military and commercial applications. What Attendees will Learn Why spectrum congestion threatens wireless reliability — Explore how over 30 billion connected devices, more than 4,000 allocation changes worldwide, and the expansion from 11 to over 80 cellular bands are intensifying contention for finite RF spectrum resources. How real-world coexistence failures affect safety-critical systems — Understand the interference risks between 5G C band transmitters a
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Accelerating Chipmaking Innovation for the Energy-Efficient AI Era
This sponsored article is brought to you by Applied Materials . At pivotal moments in history, progress has required more than individual brilliance. The most consequential breakthroughs — such as those achieved under the Human Genome Project — required a new operating paradigm: Concentrate the world’s best talent around a single mission, establish a common platform, share critical infrastructure, and collapse feedback loops. When stakes are high and timelines are compressed, sequential and siloed innovation simply cannot keep pace. Today’s AI era is creating an engineering race with similar d
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IEEE Program Aims to Connect the Billions Who Are Still Offline
Given how integral the Internet has become to everyday tasks such as shopping, paying bills, and holding virtual meetings, it’s interesting that nearly 30 percent of the global population still has no access to it. More than 2 billion people are still offline, according to a report released in November by the International Telecommunication Union . More and more people are being connected, though, thanks to IEEE Future Networks ’ Connecting the Unconnected (CTU) and similar programs. Since 2021, the technical community has been working to accelerate the development, standardization, and deploy
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Neutralizing the Gigascale Problem: How to Solve the Physical Power Paradox of Extreme AI Training Loads
This sponsored article is brought to you by Ampace . As AI workloads grow to gigascale levels, the global data center industry has hit a hidden physical wall. The real bottleneck is no longer just the thermal limit of the chip or the capacity of the cooling system — it is the dynamic resilience of the power chain. Modern AI computing clusters, driven by massive GPU clusters, generate high-frequency, abrupt, and synchronized spikey pulse loads. As rack densities soar beyond 100 kW, these fluctuations are amplified into a “power paradox”: while the digital logic of AI is moving faster than ever,
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Why Mastering EVM Is Essential for Next-Generation Wireless Systems
A comprehensive guide to error vector magnitude (EVM), the primary metric for quantifying modulation accuracy in Wi-Fi, LTE, and 5G NR systems. What Attendees will Learn What error vector magnitude is and how it is calculated — Understand EVM as the distance between ideal and measured constellation points, learn the difference between peak and RMS normalization, and see how EVM is expressed in both percentage and decibel formats. How digital modulation works and why it matters — Explore the fundamentals of ASK, FSK, PSK, APSK, and QAM modulation schemes, and understand why higher modulation or
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Ana Inês Inácio Designs the Future of Wireless
When Ana Inês Inácio goes to work at the Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research (TNO) in The Hague, she thinks about signals most people never notice: radio waves moving between satellites , sensors , and future wireless networks. The integrated circuits the research scientist designs lay the foundation for next-generation RF sensor systems critical to advancing radar technologies. Ana Inês Inácio EMPLOYER Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research, TNO TITLE Scientist IEEE MEMBER GRADE Senior member ALMA MATER University of Aveiro, in Portugal Those invisible R
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Sardinia’s Ancient Reasons for Rejecting a Clean Energy Future
“Why are you here?” Fabrizio Pilo, an electrical engineer, asks me as we sit in an outdoor café near his home in Cagliari, an ancient city on the island of Sardinia. It’s a fair question. I’m a journalist from the United States. I’d just stepped off my flight 2 hours prior and come straight to this meeting, suitcase still stowed in my rental car. I’m here to see three intriguing new energy projects under development in Sardinia. I’d heard there’s strong public resistance to renewable energy, and I want to understand why that is. I tell Pilo, who is vice rector for innovation at the University
IEEE Spectrum5/7/2026
Learn What It Takes to Become a Cybersecurity Consultant
Cybersecurity consultants have never been more in demand. Information security analyst roles are projected to grow nearly 30 percent between now and 2034 , according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics . More than 15 million cybercrime incidents occurred worldwide in 2024, Statista reported. Data breaches are costly and pose direct safety risks. Statista reported that more than US $10 trillion is spent annually repairing the damage caused by cybercrime, most commonly phishing, spoofing, extortion, and data breaches. In one example in the United States, breathalyzer devices installed in vehi
IEEE Spectrum5/6/2026
Ten Technology Enablers Shaping the Future of 6G Wireless
A guide to ten technological components — from THz communications and AI/ML to reconfigurable intelligent surfaces — poised to define 6G wireless networks. What Attendees will Learn Which frequencies 6G will use — Understand why THz bands (above 100 GHz) and the7–24 GHz range are under consideration, what challenges CMOS technology faces at sub-THz frequencies, and how new semiconductor approaches aim to close the output-power gap for future link budgets. How AI/ML and joint communications and sensing reshape the air interface — how auto encoder-based end-to-end learning can replace traditiona
IEEE Spectrum5/6/2026
Bionic Tech Must Prove Itself Beyond the Lab
I first met Robert Woo in 2011, during his third time walking in a powered exoskeleton . The architect had been paralyzed in a construction accident four years earlier, but he was determined to get back on his feet. Watching him clunk across a rehab room in an exoskeleton prototype, the technology felt astonishing. I had the same reaction when reporting on early brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), which enabled paralyzed people to move robotic arms or communicate by thought alone . Both types of bionic technology seemed to verge on magic. But that initial sense of awe, I’ve learned over many yea
IEEE Spectrum5/5/2026
IEEE Smart Village Is Helping to Electrify Rural Cameroon
More than 30 years ago, in the mountain village of Mbem in northwest Cameroon, the moon and stars in the night sky were the only light young Jude Numfor knew after the sunset. Electricity had not yet reached his rural community. “There was one person in the village with a petrol generator and a small television,” Numfor says. “When he turned it on, all the children would run to his house and peep through the window.” That memory became the spark for Numfor’s mission: to bring electricity to rural communities like his hometown. To accomplish his goal, in 2006 he cofounded Wireless Light and Pow
IEEE Spectrum5/4/2026
DAIMON Robotics Wants to Give Robot Hands a Sense of Touch
This article is brought to you by DAIMON Robotics . This April, Hong Kong-based DAIMON Robotics has released Daimon-Infinity , which it describes as the largest omni-modal robotic dataset for physical AI, featuring high resolution tactile sensing and spanning a wide range of tasks from folding laundry at home to manufacturing on factory assembly lines. The project is supported by collaborative efforts of partners across China and the globe, including Google DeepMind, Northwestern University, and the National University of Singapore. The move signals a key strategic initiative for DAIMON, a two
IEEE Spectrum5/4/2026
With $1 Cyberattacks on the Rise, Durable Defenses Pay Off
Transforming a newly discovered software vulnerability into a cyberattack used to take months. Today—as the recent headlines over Anthropic’s Project Glasswing have shown —generative AI can do the job in minutes, often for less than a dollar of cloud-computing time. But while large language models present a real cyberthreat, they also provide an opportunity to reinforce cyberdefenses. Anthropic reports its Claude Mythos preview model has already helped defenders preemptively discover over a thousand zero-day vulnerabilities , including flaws in every major operating system and web browser , wi
IEEE Spectrum4/30/2026
Transmission Hardware Corona Performance and HVDC Submarine Cable EM Fields
Laboratory or in-field measurements are often considered the gold standard for certain aspects of power system design; however, measurement approaches always have limitations. Simulation can help overcome some of these limitations, including speeding up the design process, reducing design costs, and assessing situations that are often not feasible to measure directly. In this presentation, we will discuss two examples from the power system industry. The first case we will discuss involves corona performance testing of high-voltage transmission line hardware. Corona-free insulator hardware perf
IEEE Spectrum4/30/2026
Better Hardware Could Turn Zeros into AI Heroes
When it comes to AI models, size matters. Even though some artificial-intelligence experts warn that scaling up large language models (LLMs) is hitting diminishing performance returns, companies are still coming out with ever larger AI tools. Meta’s latest Llama release had a staggering 2 trillion parameters that define the model. As models grow in size, their capabilities increase. But so do the energy demands and the time it takes to run the models, which increases their carbon footprint . To mitigate these issues, people have turned to smaller, less capable models and using lower-precision
IEEE Spectrum4/28/2026
The Chip That Made Hardware Rewriteable
Many of the world’s most advanced electronic systems—including Internet routers , wireless base stations , medical imaging scanners , and some artificial intelligence tools —depend on field-programmable gate arrays . Computer chips with internal hardware circuits, the FPGAs can be reconfigured after manufacturing. On 12 March, an IEEE Milestone plaque recognizing the first FPGA was dedicated at the Advanced Micro Devices campus in San Jose, Calif., the former Xilinx headquarters and the birthplace of the technology. The FPGA earned the Milestone designation because it introduced iteration to s
IEEE Spectrum4/28/2026
“Entanglement: A Brief History of Human Connection”
It started with word, cave, and storytelling, A line scratched on stone walls: “Meet me when the young moon rises.” The first protocol for connection. Coyote tales, forbidden scripts, Medieval texts hidden from flame. What lived in Aristotle’s lost Poetics II ? Was it God who laughed last, or we who made God laugh? Letters carried by doves, telepathic waves. Then Nikola Tesla conjured radio, electromagnetic pulses across the void, the founding signal of our networked age. Wiener dreamed in feedback loops. Shannon mapped the mathematics of longing. The internet unfurled: ARPANET to World Wide W
IEEE Spectrum4/28/2026
What Makes eVTOL Motors Different Than EV Motors?
Electric vehicles, whether they’re cars on the road or electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft, are built around similar electric motors. But there are vital differences including component costs, mass, and redundancy. Jon Wagner spent five years as the senior director of battery engineering for Tesla before joining California-based eVTOL developer Joby Aviation in 2017. He spoke with IEEE Spectrum about how engineering differs between cars and aircraft. Jon Wagner Jon Wagner leads power train and electronics at Joby Aviation. How do eVTOL motors differ from car motors? Jon Wa
IEEE Spectrum4/27/2026
Engineering Collisions: How NYU Is Remaking Health Research
This sponsored article is brought to you by NYU Tandon School of Engineering . The traditional approach to academic research goes something like this: Assemble experts from a discipline, put them in a building, and hope something useful emerges. Biology departments do biology. Engineering departments do engineering. Medical schools treat patients. NYU is turning that model inside out. At its new Institute for Engineering Health , the organizing principle centers around disease states rather than traditional disciplines. Instead of asking “what can electrical engineers contribute to medicine?,”
IEEE Spectrum4/27/2026
Modeling and Simulation Approaches for Modern Power System Studies
This webinar covers power system modeling and simulation across multiple timescales, from quasi-static 8760 analysis through EMT studies, fault classification, and inverter-based resource grid integration. What Attendees will Learn Programmatic network construction and multi-fidelity modeling — Learn how to build power system networks programmatically from standard data formats, configure models for specific engineering objectives, and work across fidelity levels from quasi-static phasor simulation through switched-linear and nonlinear electromagnetic transient (EMT) analysis. Quasi-static and
IEEE Spectrum4/27/2026
Yong Wang Turns Information Into Insights
When Yong Wang recently received one of the highest honors for early-career data visualization researchers, it marked a milestone in an extraordinary journey that began far from the world’s technology hubs. Wang was born in a small farming village in southern China to parents with limited formal education. Today the IEEE member and associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics is an assistant professor in the College of Computing and Data Science at Nanyang Technological University , in Singapore. He studies how people can employ data visualization techniques to
IEEE Spectrum4/24/2026
GPU Renters Are Playing a Silicon Lottery
Think one GPU is very much like another? Think again. It turns out that there’s surprising variability in the performance delivered by chips of the same model. That can make getting your money’s worth by renting time on a GPU from a cloud provider a real roll of the dice, according to research from the College of William & Mary, Jefferson Lab, and Silicon Data . “It’s called the silicon lottery,” says Carmen Li, founder and CEO of Silicon Data, which tracks GPU rental prices and benchmarks cloud-computing performance. The silicon lottery’s existence has been known since at least 2022, when res
IEEE Spectrum4/23/2026
What Anthropic’s Mythos Means for the Future of Cybersecurity
Two weeks ago, Anthropic announced that its new model, Claude Mythos Preview, can autonomously find and weaponize software vulnerabilities, turning them into working exploits without expert guidance. These were vulnerabilities in key software like operating systems and internet infrastructure that thousands of software developers working on those systems failed to find. This capability will have major security implications, compromising the devices and services we use every day. As a result, Anthropic is not releasing the model to the general public, but instead to a limited number of companie
IEEE Spectrum4/23/2026
This Roboticist-Turned-Teacher Built a Life-Size Replica of ENIAC
Tom Burick has always considered himself a builder. Over the years he’s designed robots, constructed a vintage teardrop trailer , and most recently, led a group of students in building a full-scale replica of a pivotal 1940s computer. Burick is a technology instructor at PS Academy in Gilbert, Ariz., a middle and high school for students with autism and other specialized learning needs. At the start of the 2025–26 school year, he began a project with his students to build a full-scale replica of the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, or ENIAC, for the 80th anniversary of the histori
IEEE Spectrum4/23/2026
Reviving Teletext for Ham Radio
Once upon a time in Europe, television remote controls had a magic teletext button. Years before the internet stole into homes, pressing that button brought up teletext digital information services with hundreds of constantly updated pages. Living in Ireland in the 1980s and ’90s, my family accessed the national teletext service— Aertel —multiple times a day for weather and news bulletins, as well as things like TV program guides and updates on airport flight arrivals. It was an elegant system: fast, low bandwidth, unaffected by user load, and delivering readable text even on analog television
IEEE Spectrum4/22/2026
Building an Interregional Transmission Overlay for a Resilient U.S. Grid
Examining how a U.S. Interregional Transmission Overlay could address aging grid infrastructure, surging demand, and renewable integration challenges. What Attendees will Learn Why the current regional grid structure is approaching its limits — Explore how coal-fired generation retirements, renewable integration, aging infrastructure past its 50-year lifespan, and exponential large-load growth from data centers and manufacturing reshoring are creating unprecedented pressure on the U.S. transmission system. How an Interregional Transmission Overlay (ITO) would work — Understand the architecture
IEEE Spectrum4/22/2026
What to Consider Before You Accept a Management Role
This article is crossposted from IEEE Spectrum ’s careers newsletter. Sign up now to get insider tips, expert advice, and practical strategies, written i n partnership with tech career development company Parsity and delivered to your inbox for free! The Individual Contributor–Manager Fork: It’s Not a Promotion. It’s a Profession Change. When I was promoted to engineering manager of a mid-sized team at Clorox, I thought I had made it. More money. More stock. More visibility. More proximity to senior leadership. From the outside, and on paper, it was clearly a promotion. I had often heard the p
IEEE Spectrum4/21/2026
Andrew Ng: Unbiggen AI
Andrew Ng has serious street cred in artificial intelligence. He pioneered the use of graphics processing units (GPUs) to train deep learning models in the late 2000s with his students at Stanford University , cofounded Google Brain in 2011, and then served for three years as chief scientist for Baidu , where he helped build the Chinese tech giant’s AI group. So when he says he has identified the next big shift in artificial intelligence, people listen. And that’s what he told IEEE Spectrum in an exclusive Q&A. Ng’s current efforts are focused on his company Landing AI , which built a platform
IEEE Spectrum2/9/2022
How AI Will Change Chip Design
The end of Moore’s Law is looming. Engineers and designers can do only so much to miniaturize transistors and pack as many of them as possible into chips . So they’re turning to other approaches to chip design, incorporating technologies like AI into the process. Samsung, for instance, is adding AI to its memory chips to enable processing in memory, thereby saving energy and speeding up machine learning. Speaking of speed, Google’s TPU V4 AI chip has doubled its processing power compared with that of its previous version. But AI holds still more promise and potential for the semiconductor indu
IEEE Spectrum2/8/2022
Atomically Thin Materials Significantly Shrink Qubits
Quantum computing is a devilishly complex technology, with many technical hurdles impacting its development. Of these challenges two critical issues stand out: miniaturization and qubit quality. IBM has adopted the superconducting qubit road map of reaching a 1,121-qubit processor by 2023 , leading to the expectation that 1,000 qubits with today’s qubit form factor is feasible. However, current approaches will require very large chips (50 millimeters on a side, or larger) at the scale of small wafers, or the use of chiplets on multichip modules. While this approach will work, the aim is to att
IEEE Spectrum2/7/2022