I’ve often wondered whether there are secret clubs, meetings, or chat rooms for marketing people. I wonder about this because when I roam around an exhibition hall such as this year’s International MTT-S Symposia (IMS 2026) and talk to a bunch of them, I invariably hear certain words repeatedly trotted out.

The usual colloquialism for these oft-repeated words is “buzzword,” which the Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines as “an important-sounding, usually technical, word or phrase often of little meaning used chiefly to impress laymen.”

I understand that the “big picture” part of marketing is to divine market trends and help steer businesses in lucrative directions. Sometimes marketers succeed in doing that in a proactive and successful way.

For example, NXP Semiconductors made an early push into complete 5G RF infrastructure solutions. NXP foresaw that a winning strategy in 5G would be to visualize it as an active-antenna and massive-MIMO integration problem and not just higher-frequency power amplifiers.

But marketers sometimes fall prey to wishful thinking. For instance, in the early part of this decade, it seemed that traditional radio-access networks (RANs) would be quickly displaced by Open RAN and/or virtual RANs. Surely, network operators would want disaggregation of RANs to gain multi-vendor flexibility and become system integrators themselves.

But reality has proved to be much messier and slower than the enthusiastic messaging would imply. It’s not that Open RAN isn’t an important strategic direction. It’s that performance, power, and cost parity with purpose-built RANs hasn’t happened yet. The ramp up in Open RAN will take longer than marketers had hoped.

This Year’s IMS Buzzwords (Part I): Artificial Intelligence

It only takes a day or so on a show floor to begin discerning the current buzzwords. At IMS 2026, there proved to be two: “artificial intelligence” (AI) and “quantum.”

AI comes up primarily in the context of RF design-automation software flows. There was a good deal of real technical content about the use of AI in modeling, such as a workshop on AI-assisted modeling of RF components for digital twins of wireless systems. The goal was to learn advanced methods for characterizing things like beamformers and RF front ends and to show how AI-driven behavioral models can help predict system performance across various conditions.

One of that workshop’s presenters, Mathworks’ Giorgia Zucchelli, took me through a demo showing how measurement and behavioral modeling techniques connect hardware prototypes with digital twins in the context of complex radar and satcom systems. The demo was born in collaboration with Analog Devices and integrates validated RF hardware models of ADI products.

The digital-twin capability will enable engineers to assess architectural tradeoffs and performance earlier in the design cycle. Hardware models can be combined with system-level simulation to analyze end-to-end behavior.

Keysight EDA also leaned into AI in its booth presentations, showing how AI accelerates RF design by automating routine tasks like impedance matching, filtering, and component synthesis. Keysight EDA’s capabilities are built on Python-driven workflows and IP data for creation of intelligent models for faster optimization and reuse. AI copilots guide the design process from end to end.

This Year’s IMS Buzzwords (Part II): Quantum

The second buzzword at IMS 2026 was “quantum,” and for good reason. Microwave frequencies from about 1 to 10 GHz are critical to quantum computing because they match the energy scale of many solid-state qubits. Microwaves can resonantly drive transitions between quantum states. Thus, quantum electronics depend heavily on microwave engineering.

Things like cryogenic microwave transmission lines, attenuators/filters to suppress thermal noise, and amplifiers based on Josephson junctions, to name a few, are critical to the function of quantum computers. Without precise microwave engineering, qubits can quickly decohere due to noise.

At IMS 2026, well over 60 sessions and/or papers presented covered aspects of the intersection of microwave technology and quantum physics. It’s obviously top of mind for the organizers of the conference’s technical program as it represents a potential growth path for the industry.

On the exhibition floor, many vendors were eager to tout their developments on the quantum front. For RF components to be useful in quantum applications, they must exhibit stable RF impedance down to low milli-Kelvin temperatures, offer low thermal conductivity, behave repeatably under thermal cycling, and deliver controlled attenuation and phase stability for microwave qubit control.

Menlo Microsystems, for one, debuted its MM5800 switching platform. The device covers DC to 70 GHz for applications in silicon photonics high-frequency test systems. It also can operate at cryogenic temperatures, making it a candidate for quantum applications.

Radiall walked me through the quantum capabilities embodied in its new Cryonium Quantum Computing Range of cryogenic interconnects. The line includes semi-rigid 3D cabling, RF connectors, attenuators, infrared filters, RF low-pass filters, switches, and a 40-way multi-coaxial connector. All are made to operate reliably at near-absolute-zero temperatures.

Only time will tell whether these buzzwords will represent true forward-looking innovation on the part of industry players, or will fall into the “wishful thinking” bucket of misguided (or mis-timed) investments.