[edrxty]

Where are all the jobs going? There are a lot of RF things going on at an ever increasing pace but I don't see a lot of people hiring in the field. Do all the defense primes just have a silo of gray beards they keep in a dungeon somewhere?

[mwbajor]

Yes. Many analog design groups in college went from 10's of students 10-15 years ago to just a few now, not due to lack of funding but due to a lack of interest. Our interface to nature is through analog signals but due to the heavy reliance on HW intuition and its relative inflexibility (but more 'elegant solutions' if you ask me) analog electronics continues to grow in unpopularity in industry and academia follows. Yes, there are just some older guys updating old designs in many instances. The push for RFSOCs and similar products is partially to reduce reliance on the greybeards. Its a shame because there are very interesting areas of analog electronics such as continuous time signal processing.

TLDR: To answer your question, to reduce the reliance on a relative few engineers, the market solved it with a few products that are 'just good enough'. This has become a self perpetuating cycle, race to the bottom. There will still be many analog/RF EEs but relegated to a few niche sub-industries serving mainly the DoD and RFIC industries. Even the telecom industry is planning to pipe back raw, downconverted baseband data to a central location to do SDR DSP rather than rely on a modem at the basestation. All for flexibility in lieu of power/efficiency, NRE etc.

[edrxty]

Would you recommend making the transition if it was available? I've been eyeing a lateral move from optical control/processing software into a sort of full stack rf role. Nobody is hiring from what I've seen but everywhere I've been I end up moonlighting with the RF team helping with DSP and high throughput ADC on down stuff. They're always understaffed and I have my amateur extra and know just enough to be dangerous so I get pulled on to help.

[mwbajor]

" full stack rf role"

This is the right idea, in many cases, the "HW" team might focus on RF but does "antennas to bits" (i hate that term) because of the need to get a prototype up and running to test it. If you have baseband circuit and DSP experience you could be poised for a lateral move especially since the operational frequency will be less critical for your skills. For example, without years of mmWave experience a move into doing mmWave RF wouldn't make sense but that doesn't mean you can't work on other parts of the mmWave system.

RF HW design is very much a systems engineering field and folks that have experience in each block are more desirable than ones that focus on only one piece in most cases.

[willis936]

You aren't painting a fair picture. RFSoCs cost more but they also have much more dynamic range (both amplitude and temporal). It's just just about configurability, but also performance.

[edrxty]

Yeah the rfsocs are popular because they're nuts. From a defense pov being able to be that frequency agile is really a big deal.

[mwbajor]

You really are proving my point. Based on your misuse of nomenclature its obvious you're not a HW guy. The ADC is the last in an RF chain and typically sets the systems dynamic range if you've done things right. There is nothing special about the ADC in the RFSOC other than the designer will not need to worry about creating a physical, digital interface to the programmable logic.

I don't even know where to start on your "temporal dynamic range" comment....