From 6G to quantum computing and AI: How a 1950s invention shapes tech giants of today and tomorrow

00:00:03: From five-G networks to aerospace systems, from artificial intelligence to quantum technologies, from behind-the-scenes of innovations to real-world applications.

00:00:17: Welcome

00:00:17: to Innovations Unplugged.

00:00:20: The Rode & Schwarz Technology Podcast.

00:00:24: Hello, I'm Inga Müller-Siedentop.

00:00:27: And I'm Markus Haller.

00:00:29: In today's episode, we are pulling back the curtain on a technology that quietly powers the world's most advanced innovations.

00:00:39: The vector network analyzer or

00:00:42: VNA.

00:00:44: Maybe you have never heard of it.

00:00:46: At least I have had never heard of it before I started working at Rode & Schwarz.

00:00:53: For seventy-five years, it's helped design wireless communications and radar systems from smartphones to satellites, electric vehicles to six G. VNAs are the tools behind the tech.

00:01:08: And as if that weren't impressive enough, the Vektron network analyzers were born at Rode and Schwartz in the nineteen fifties.

00:01:18: That's why we're celebrating its birthday today.

00:01:21: and its legacy, while looking ahead at how it's shaping the future.

00:01:26: Joining us is Michael Fischlein, one of our top red and black experts for network and spectrum analysis.

00:01:35: He knows the VNA inside and out and why it's more relevant now than ever.

00:01:42: Welcome Michael.

00:01:43: It's great to be with you guys here.

00:01:48: Michael, let's start with something close to home.

00:01:53: If I'm texting a friend or streaming content, if I'm navigating with GPS in my car or even listening to this podcast, how does the Vector Network Analyzer enable these technologies?

00:02:08: It's maybe a hidden champion behind all these technologies.

00:02:13: So the network analyzer is measuring radio frequencies and the behavior of radio frequencies in circuits, for example.

00:02:19: It's a tool to help the engineer to understand what is the performance of the individual components.

00:02:25: RF components like filters or amplifiers.

00:02:28: The network analyzer is a tool to go for the engineers in R&D, production or characterization.

00:02:34: It's a tool engineers across the electronics industry use in the background.

00:02:40: It impacts our everyday digital... lives.

00:02:43: But most people have never heard of a VNA.

00:02:46: How would you explain what a vector network analyzer really does?

00:02:52: A network analyzer is making use of so-called S-parameter.

00:02:57: And based on these S-parameter, you can say, OK, how much is a signal amplified or attenuated?

00:03:05: Or how far a signal is reflected?

00:03:08: And later on, in the design flow, you're putting all these ingredients together and you get then the overall performance from antenna to the digital back end of a laptop or of a Wi-Fi router, for example.

00:03:24: And each individual stage will be optimized by a vector network analyzer.

00:03:30: Thinking about that, why haven't we heard more about

00:03:33: it?

00:03:33: Yeah, so first of all they are everywhere and we are selling our V&A's in ninety nine point nine percent of the cases to B to B. So business to business to our customers.

00:03:45: And the nice thing is we are working with them also because they're coming to us and asking for the measurement challenge and we have to come back with a solution to them.

00:03:56: Interaction also is a typical Roder and Schwarz style, I would say, that we are working close with our customers and want to understand the customer problem and want to solve

00:04:08: it.

00:04:11: And to understand how VNAs became so essential, let's take a moment and look back.

00:04:17: Imagine being a radio frequency engineer back in the nineteen forties.

00:04:24: After World War Two, radios are common.

00:04:27: black and white televisions were just starting to make their way into homes.

00:04:32: What was it like being an electrical engineer back then before Vektron Network analyzers?

00:04:38: I think the time before VNAs the circuits were not that optimized as it was on the later stage.

00:04:46: To give you an example, we are talking about sustainability, of course, how much energy consumption is really required to transmit from A to B. And then vector network analyzer helps to optimize this kind of parameters.

00:04:59: Maybe to give you a catchphrase here, I remember reading an article from, I think a colleague you might know, Michael Hebel.

00:05:06: Sure.

00:05:07: And he was giving, he had a nice phrase and he said, Back then, it was the days of the slotted lines.

00:05:16: Can you elaborate a bit on that?

00:05:19: First of all, greetings to Michael.

00:05:20: Hope you're also here with the podcast.

00:05:22: On these slotted lines, I think the difference is just simply the effort engineer needed to spend.

00:05:28: For us in our DNA, it's always to think about the customer problem.

00:05:32: And the customer problem that time was, okay, it takes the hell of time.

00:05:36: really, really long to get that other measurement data.

00:05:40: It was a highly manual and aeropron work.

00:05:44: And then in the fifties we started to think about how to make the life for our customers easier.

00:05:48: The

00:05:48: year nineteen fifty marks a milestone.

00:05:51: Rodin Schwartz engineers laid the foundation for modern vector network analyzers.

00:05:58: The ZG diagram was the first instrument

00:06:02: to show

00:06:04: complex as parameters on something called a Smith chart.

00:06:09: Michael please fill us in.

00:06:11: Why was that?

00:06:13: breakthrough.

00:06:14: Oh, this mischat, I still know it from the university.

00:06:16: So first of all, this is something you learn as an electrical engineer.

00:06:20: If you are choosing the right specialization, you learn about mischats.

00:06:25: Thank

00:06:25: you for explaining.

00:06:29: And the beauty of this diagram is you see immediately the amplitude and phase information in this kind of representation.

00:06:37: When you talked about the beauty of the instruments, it's about visualization.

00:06:43: Because before you had, maybe you had data, but you had to analyze it manually.

00:06:49: And now you have a chart that already visualizes your data, right?

00:06:53: And this was back in these days, the innovation in the end.

00:06:58: How much time did it take to get from your data to a Smith chart?

00:07:03: I think in former times it took hours.

00:07:05: And now we are then... down to less than maybe half an hour or something like that.

00:07:12: So it was much faster.

00:07:13: And now we're starting to see why this is a big innovation to have all your data suddenly on a Smith chart already.

00:07:21: You don't have to calculate.

00:07:23: You just look at the screen and you know what's happening without calculating.

00:07:27: that might be error prone, takes time.

00:07:30: Maybe it's a bit frustrating for engineers.

00:07:35: Let's

00:07:35: fast forward to today.

00:07:38: VNAs are compact, they are digital, often fully automated.

00:07:43: How has the VNA evolved?

00:07:45: from an idea in a German lab to attest and measurement instrument with global impact.

00:07:51: Today we are looking into enhancing all the tools that often been in former times.

00:07:56: It was just small signal S-parameter thing.

00:07:59: Now coming back to an amplifier example.

00:08:03: When you inject one watt, the amplifier has a gain of ten.

00:08:07: You will get ten watts out of it.

00:08:08: But it doesn't scale until one hundred watt or whatever.

00:08:13: And therefore, you will see nonlinear effects.

00:08:15: In daily life, you see this if you turn on the volume of your smartphone or whatever.

00:08:21: When you listen to a podcast, for example, and you turn it on and on and on, the effect is getting less and less clear.

00:08:29: This comes to the point that we are driving an amplifier in a nonlinear region.

00:08:36: I think every audience is trying it right

00:08:40: now.

00:08:40: We are supporting now on the customers on this use case, the other side, turning the volume smaller and smaller.

00:08:46: Then you're also going to have an effect of hearing noise, for example.

00:08:50: So we are very, very

00:08:51: quiet here.

00:08:52: And then you also see that the quality will suffer

00:08:54: of the podcast.

00:08:57: So in the end, you can also measure.

00:08:58: it's called noise figure.

00:09:00: You can also measure then it's called frequency converting components.

00:09:03: You can also measure more and more higher frequencies.

00:09:06: So in former times, the tool, it started maybe at one hundred megahertz.

00:09:11: But the communication systems are evolving and the frequencies are getting higher and higher.

00:09:17: So to name an example, in former times, the mobile communication were available maybe up to four.

00:09:28: six gigahertz around that range.

00:09:30: But on five G we have a tool, then we are talking about a frequency from ten twenty four to fifty two gigahertz, for example.

00:09:40: V&A's they started as pure laboratory tools, but now they are also very common in production environments, right?

00:09:49: Yeah.

00:09:50: Give us an example that everyone can understand.

00:09:53: How does a production environment look like when V&A's are in the cycle.

00:10:00: How can we picture this kind of production environment?

00:10:03: So first of all, you need to imagine that a V&A in production doesn't have these very nice display.

00:10:12: The customer requirement is to build an instrument as compact as possible.

00:10:16: You see, in the end, an instrument with a lot of connectors.

00:10:20: So it's not very display, no knobs.

00:10:23: So back

00:10:24: to the general... box kind of thing with a lot of inputs.

00:10:29: Yeah, with a lot of inputs.

00:10:30: And then connected to a so-called handler.

00:10:33: And the handler is taking the component under test out of a reel, put it into the test fixture, and then we will test it, measure it, and then the next component is coming.

00:10:48: Just to give you an example, in a smartphone, we are talking about around twenty filters.

00:10:55: maybe more, sometimes more, sometimes less.

00:10:59: And all these twenty filters are tested, one hundred percent.

00:11:03: You need to imagine that how many filters in our smartphones.

00:11:06: I think I have two smartphones, right?

00:11:08: So maybe we're talking about now ten billion smartphones all over the world and all these filters are tested.

00:11:15: Can you give us facts and figures like in numbers?

00:11:18: Maybe we're talking about, I know it from one customer around.

00:11:23: ten million filters around that per week.

00:11:30: And everyone is tested.

00:11:31: Everyone is tested.

00:11:32: Wow.

00:11:33: And then you need to imagine, of course, when I talk about microseconds, it's one measurement point now, and you are sweeping maybe two hundred, one thousand points and so on.

00:11:44: Now you can calculate that the measure takes milliseconds.

00:11:49: And that's just the sweeping.

00:11:50: You also have to include the connecting of the filter to the VNA.

00:11:57: Roughly how much time do I have for all of it?

00:12:00: Are we still in milliseconds?

00:12:02: Oh yeah, it's still in the millisecond range.

00:12:05: And it's really impressive when you see it in a production line how fast this mechanical movement is.

00:12:10: So we talked about mass production kind of a lot.

00:12:15: That makes me actually curious about the other side of it.

00:12:18: You are a leading expert at Roland Schwarz in the field of network and spectrum analysis and you have been with our company for over twenty five years.

00:12:29: What's the most unexpected use of a VNA that you've come across?

00:12:34: is there any.

00:12:36: Yeah, of course, you will be surprised where V&As are used.

00:12:41: Very nice story.

00:12:43: I got from Jamie as an application engineer out in the UK.

00:12:47: Greetings to Jamie as well.

00:12:51: He had a customer who did some research or is still doing research on black holes.

00:12:58: I did not expect that.

00:12:59: Yeah, I didn't expect that either.

00:13:01: And what they are doing is they are generating a signal with a VNA, sending it out of space.

00:13:08: Something is reflected.

00:13:10: And this something needs to be analyzed, but the dynamic range required.

00:13:15: So dynamic range means what I'm going to inject in my device under test.

00:13:20: This is a black hole, the device under test.

00:13:22: And what is very

00:13:23: far, far away.

00:13:24: Far, far away, yeah.

00:13:26: And what comes back from the device under test?

00:13:28: and there is a lot of attenuation in between.

00:13:31: So you're going really to the physical limits here.

00:13:34: That sounds really fascinating.

00:13:36: The instrument in that condition is very sensitive.

00:13:39: There was even for the first amplifier, which is used, it's cooled down to zero degree Kelvin or almost zero degree Kelvin.

00:13:51: Just

00:13:51: to emphasize this, we're not talking about zero degree Celsius, but as cold as it can be.

00:13:58: And I guess it's roughly minus two hundred seventy three degrees Celsius.

00:14:02: Something like that.

00:14:04: So that's amazing.

00:14:08: We have heard about the V&A's history and we've heard about why they are so relevant today.

00:14:14: So let's talk about tomorrow.

00:14:16: OK.

00:14:17: How do Michael Vektor Network Analyzer support cutting edge technologies like quantum, like artificial intelligence or satellite systems.

00:14:27: Yes, so first of all, when we talk about quantum, a network analyzer is used to calibrate the system.

00:14:37: Have you ever seen a quantum computer?

00:14:39: Of course, yeah, a very futuristic thing, yeah, and with a lot of cabling, yeah, these silver shining cables and all these cables needs to.

00:14:49: it should be calibrated that the phase at the end of the cable is on all the inputs the same.

00:14:58: And this is one step and later the thing is calibrated.

00:15:02: We have then a second part of it where we have solutions from Zurich Instruments.

00:15:06: Spoiler

00:15:07: alert, Zurich Instruments is one of our subsidiaries that is dealing with the measurement instruments especially for quantum computing control systems and We will cover them in one of our next podcast episodes.

00:15:22: So stay

00:15:23: tuned.

00:15:24: So that was quantum.

00:15:25: Can you tell us a bit about how RVNA is touching AI if they do and satellite systems?

00:15:34: When it comes to AI, we see there is a massive amount of data centers are built.

00:15:40: And a big problem in these data centers are the cables.

00:15:43: So the connecting the different building blocks of an data center together.

00:15:52: So you have very high data rates and these are very expensive cable.

00:15:55: These cables is one of the big obstacles or problems putting in a data center into operation.

00:16:02: The bottleneck is the data cable.

00:16:03: Yeah, really the data cable is something.

00:16:06: if one of these cables are broken, it costs a hell amount of money.

00:16:10: for all customers to get it exchanged or identified.

00:16:14: And therefore, again, similar as on the filter we mentioned before, all these cables and data centers are one hundred percent checked.

00:16:21: Actually, every cable is checked in production, right?

00:16:25: Is that point?

00:16:26: Every high-speed digital cable is checked in production.

00:16:30: But just a quick question on that.

00:16:33: The data center and looking like.

00:16:35: looking into the future.

00:16:38: Cables are also evolving.

00:16:40: We are coming from traditional kind of classic cables going towards or heading towards optical fibers.

00:16:49: Is that something that vector network analyzers will still cover or is that something totally different?

00:16:54: Good question.

00:16:56: So you can indeed use a network analyzer together with with an electrical to optical converter or optical electrical converter, also together to characterize and measure these kind of optical cables as well.

00:17:11: So even here, when we're looking to the future, or I think when longer cables are required in the data centers, they are making use of optical.

00:17:20: Okay, Jack, so we do have work in the future.

00:17:25: For sure.

00:17:26: All right.

00:17:26: And some comments on satellite systems.

00:17:29: So

00:17:29: first of all, it's amazing how fast the new space industry is evolving.

00:17:34: And of course, they also have measurement problems.

00:17:37: In the past, I think when you are sending out in satellite into the orbit, I think it was a lot of steps.

00:17:48: done to characterize or to measure the transmit and receive part of the satellite.

00:17:56: But today I think they are sending out much more satellites, so ten thousands of satellites now into the orbit.

00:18:07: And of course they don't have the time to characterize.

00:18:11: every single parameter

00:18:15: of a

00:18:15: satellite.

00:18:17: Also here the trend goes more into measuring faster.

00:18:21: This is definitely something we see.

00:18:23: also trends that definitely we are reaching higher frequency ranges and also different kind of communication.

00:18:32: where we're talking about modulation schemes.

00:18:38: We're talking about rapidly evolving technologies.

00:18:41: So does that mean for VNAs?

00:18:44: They not just have to cover the current specifications and measurement needs, but also be kind of future proof.

00:18:54: Is that an issue or something you think about?

00:18:57: Yeah, when we're looking into the customer scenarios, I think we need always to have around maybe ten DB.

00:19:03: better specifications than the device under test of the customer.

00:19:08: So we always need to be better, of course, as a tester measurement vendor or solution provider compared to what is required by the customer.

00:19:17: And it depends what our customer need.

00:19:21: If they are looking into really going into the physical limits, we have to try to push this physical limit.

00:19:27: You also need, I guess, to anticipate future technological needs.

00:19:34: So in designing a product, how do we as Roder & Schwartz

00:19:39: do this?

00:19:40: Looking at maybe two, three, four, five years down the road, you can anticipate what happens.

00:19:46: Are we moving into higher frequencies?

00:19:49: Are we moving into more... or higher bandwidth requirements, are we are moving more into a better performance.

00:19:56: This is something very close to the customer, which is looking really ahead into the future where other trends.

00:20:02: And since you are not just a technician, but also a manager, putting all this into the perspective of company culture, what do you think sets the company Roder and Schwartz apart when tackling these tough technological challenges?

00:20:19: First of all, what you're doing, for example, in R&D, you're doing engineering art.

00:20:25: So you're learning the basis, like on Smithschart, what I mentioned before, in university.

00:20:32: But one thing is a basis, but the other one is really to use it to build a test and measurement instruments, which is really also... appreciated by our customers in terms of accuracy or measurement speed or whatever.

00:20:47: And therefore a lot of knowledge is something you can learn on V&A's and you can be part of a big team.

00:20:55: It's a team effort.

00:20:58: And this is first of all a very nice thing also in my V&A R&D group.

00:21:03: very young and ambitious guys, and I really love to work with them.

00:21:08: But you have also, of course, in the V&A, other interfaces.

00:21:13: Two-hour customers, two-product management, even two-production.

00:21:17: It's really nice, which motivated me as a young engineer when I started to draw it in Schwarz.

00:21:23: Actually, I just wished that our audience could see the sparkling in your eyes when you were talking.

00:21:29: So it's nice to talk with them.

00:21:31: I'm always excited.

00:21:32: I'm really, really excited about being able to... After twenty-five

00:21:34: years still,

00:21:35: which is

00:21:36: something cultural with this company, right?

00:21:40: You already put it before, like pushing boundaries is something that needs to be done in that field, right?

00:21:48: That reminds me of a quote of one of our founders, actually.

00:21:53: It brings me back to that one.

00:21:55: In Germany, it goes like, wir müssen den Stein weiterwerfen.

00:22:01: That means, hier, at Rode & Schwarz, innovation is in our DNA, driving us to constantly push the boundaries of technology.

00:22:13: Do you feel that?

00:22:14: Oh, for sure.

00:22:15: I have also a nice example where I just started a development where we are really working together, gathering the market requirements and also had great ideas from R&D to really push the customer problem into another level.

00:22:28: It's really recently started a project.

00:22:30: It was amazing to see how the different teams are working together.

00:22:34: That actually is a great close for our podcast for today.

00:22:38: I would say thank you for sharing your excitement.

00:22:42: I felt it.

00:22:43: I hope our audience did get.

00:22:47: the same feeling.

00:22:48: You are still full of enthusiasm for your field of expertise.

00:22:53: Thank you for being with us.

00:22:54: It was a pleasure.

00:22:55: It was fun.

00:22:55: Yes, Michael.

00:22:56: Thanks a lot for this interesting conversation.

00:22:59: If you liked that podcast, if you liked what you heard from Michael today about V&A's, it might be interesting to tune in again another time, so feel free to subscribe to our channel.

00:23:13: And make sure to check out the show notes for some additional material to this episode.