It's traditional among both consumer and technical media sources (sometimes called "publications") to close out one year and begin another with various "top" lists, and we certainly want to be part of that tradition. Unlike subjective lists such as "best movies", "best ads", or "most newsworthy items", we can use an objective measure here at RF DesignLine: page views. And while consumer publications find that such lists should use prime numbers to catch your attention ("13 Ways to Lose Weight Now", "17 Tips for Success"), we're sticking with a basic Top 20.
Of course, as with any lists or data, you have to think about what they indicate and how they were compiled. While have absolute precision in measuring the page views, of course, we still faced some choices. For example, do we segregate items which were published prior to 2009, or include them in the list? What about multipart articles: do we add up their individual page views for a single aggregate score, or leave them as is? What about items which were published late in the year, and so have had much less time to garner attention?
In the end, we followed the time-honored engineering principle: keep it simple. Rather than try to be smarter than the raw data, we are presenting using the data "as is." The list below shows the twenty most-viewed features published at RF DesignLine, along with the author and year of publication (and see the links below the top-20 list for the corresponding items for our sibling sites, Power Management DesignLine and Planet Analog). Looking at the list, you'll also get a good sense of both the new and long-term topics which most interested RF-centric electronic engineers in 2009:
- "RFID Basics: Antenna Gain and Range", Daniel M. Dobkin, 2007
- "10 Companies in trouble", EE Times, 2009
- "Radio Architectures, Pt 2: Receivers, LOs, and Mixers", Christopher Bowick, 2008
- "Mobile WiMAX PHY (RF) operation and measurement, Part 1", Peter Cain, Agilent Technologies, 2008
- "To ZigBee or Not to ZigBee? Factors to consider when selecting ZigBee Technology", Iboun Taimiya Sylla, Texas Instruments, 2009
- "Radio Basics for RFID: Modulation and Multiplexing", Daniel M. Dobkin, 2007
- "Understand Radio Architectures, Part 1", Christopher Bowick, 2008
- "RFID Basics: Backscatter Radio Links and Link Budgets", Daniel M. Dobkin, 2007
- "Sniffing GSM off the air", David A. Hall, National Instruments, 2008
- "RFID Technology and Testing", Darren McCarthy, Tektronix, 2009
- "What Every RF Engineer Should Know: ZigBee", Janine Love, 2009
- "Radio Basics for RFID, Part 1", Daniel M. Dobkin, 2007
- "What's in an RF Front End?", Christopher Bowick, 2008
- "Fundamentals of ISM-Band and short range device antennas, Part 2", Matthew Loy and Iboun Sylla, Texas Instruments, 007
- "Understanding RF power amplifiers", Christopher Bowick, 2008
- "Direct conversion receiver designs enable multi-standard/multi-band operation", Rakesh Soni and Eric Newman, Analog Devices, Inc., 2009
- "Getting some basic RF experience", Bill Schweber, 2009
- "The ISM Revolution: The Next Big Thing", Iboun Taimiya Sylla, Texas Instruments, 2009
- "Book Excerpt--RF Front-End: World Class Designs (Part 7 of 7)", Janine Sullivan Love, 2009
- "Improving multi-carrier PA efficiency using envelope tracking", Gerard Wimpenny, Nujira, 2008
At our sibling sites:
|
