Vanessa Rodriguez

Keysight World Americas 2019: Breaking Down Barriers Across Disciplines

2019-06-03 | 5 min read

Written by Jacob Bouchard, a graduate student at Worcester Polytechnic Institute working on photonic integrated circuits for chemical sensing, millimeter wave radiation for non-destructive material characterization, and millimeter wave based frequency modulated continuous wave radars for vital sign detection. Jacob attended Keysight World Americas virtually and writes about his experience at the event.

Keysight World was a great place to meet with others involved in the 5G revolution as well as hear about exciting new developments from Keysight. As a student, listening to the plenary talks and the special sessions gave me insight into new innovations and got me motivated to work with others to shape the future. Guy Kawasaki was an absolute inspiration; his plenary talk was so engaging. Even as a newbie to these fields, the special sessions were still very accessible to me. I also really appreciated the livestreams as it was not possible for me to make it out to San Francisco.

Being able to access the streams is also key since it allows me to share the talks with my coworkers and refer back to them later on. The slides from the talks are also very valuable as reference materials. Keysight did a great job at making sure that the talks were accessible to people of varying levels of experience. Being able to sign up for multiple tracks was also very helpful to me, as it allowed me to sign up for all of the tracks and watch the livestreams at my convenience. Splitting the talks into multiple tracks allowed the speakers to get into much more detail and spend more time describing their work in depth. This event served as a very important road mapping session for a wide variety of applications.

Keysight’s wide reach allows them to break down the barriers between different applications. This is key as it will allow for future collaboration between different disciplines. These collaborations will allow for a greater understanding of current technologies as well as allow for much more meaningful work on future technologies. The 5G track did a great job at discussing the current and future radio standards regarding 5G. This was a great use of the platform that Keysight Worlds’ provides. The Automotive and Energy track was particularly interesting to me since I have done work on FMCW radars for automotive applications. Seeing the future developments as well as what has been done in the automotive field helped to give me a better understanding of the environment that my work exists in. I also have experience in the photonic integrated circuits field with particular focus in optical communications and optical data processing. This allowed me to really appreciate the Data Center and Telecom track. This track focused mostly on strictly electrical components. Rob Sleigh’s talk “400G: Looking Forward to 800G and Terabit Speeds”, addressed more of the optical side of the communication discipline. A lot of the systems that I have been working with are in the Millimeter-Wave band, so a lot of the talks in the Advanced measurements track were particularly interesting to me. Dr. Joel Dunsmore’s talk “Perfecting Your Wideband Modulated Source: Distortion and Correction”, is a talk that I know that I will be referring back to in the future as it outlined methods that allow for the creation of high-performance signals.

Overall, Keysight Worlds was a very positive experience for me and I am looking forward to next year!