Direct involvement with drafting communications standards. Understanding Communication theory, advanced mathematics & algorithms. Computer Science involved with

Direct involvement with drafting communications standards. Understanding Communication theory, advanced mathematics & algorithms. Computer Science involved with Hardware acceleration of the DSP algorithms. Quality of Results measurement and testing involving ridiculously expensive test equipment. (Like one piece of test equipment will cost as much as a house) Large scale chip manufacturing will require direct involvement with Semiconductor fabrication plants. the baseband comms chips are basically driving the latest small-scale wafer technology and requires the fab to evolve new techniques and new machinery. A 'winner takes all' environment, where the winning company will either win the mutli-million dollar contract, or take a huge hit. Because the baseband side is inherently centralized, it's not realistic to have many separate deployed solutions. I worked on comms for many years. It's interesting because so much human effort has been spent finding very sophisticated ways for processing large numbers of independent signals, and correcting errors. There are very intersting problems like digital pre-distortion, adaptive equalization etc. and crazy linear algebra problems. But the down side, is that you would most likely be working on a small piece of the large puzzle, and there is very little recognition for the amount of work required. There are very few 'famous' baseband engineers. The feeling is very much like a cog in the machine you you don't really see your direct contribution.