RF Is Dead (Or at Least Finally Fading): The Collapse of the RF Chain

For most of my career, “RF is dead” was more of a talking point than anything real. But over the last five to ten years, the underlying changes have been adding up.

Photo by Susan Wilkinson on Unsplash

For as long as I’ve been around the aerospace and defense industry, RF systems have all followed roughly the same pattern.

You bring a signal in through an antenna, you filter it, amplify it, shift it down in frequency a few times, clean it up, and eventually you get it into the digital domain where you can actually do something useful with it. That structure has been around forever. Not because it’s elegant, but because it had to be. Digital just couldn’t keep up.

What’s changed over the last five to ten years is that this constraint has been slowly going away. Nothing dramatic all at once, just steady progress, but enough that it feels like we’re getting close to a real inflection point.

If you think about it, the traditional RF chain was always a workaround. We couldn’t directly digitize high-frequency signals, so we built all this analog machinery just to make that possible. You isolate the signal, boost it, translate it down, condition it enough so that an ADC can handle it. Anyone who’s worked around this kind of hardware knows how much effort goes into making that chain behave consistently.

But all of that complexity really comes from one limitation, which is that you couldn’t get into the digital domain early enough. That limitation is what’s been steadily eroding.

What I’m seeing now isn’t that RF disappears, it’s that it’s shrinking. The amount of analog processing you need before digitization is getting smaller. Architecturally, things are starting to look a lot simpler. You still have an antenna and some front-end conditioning, but instead of a long chain of stages, you move into digital much sooner and let software do the heavy lifting.

From a systems perspective, that’s a pretty big shift. Once you’re in digital, everything becomes more flexible. You can change how you filter, how you tune, how you separate signals, without touching hardware. That wasn’t really practical before.

I’ve been hearing people say “RF is dead” for most of my career. Over 30+ years, working at the system level, around apertures, and in RF systems and subsystems at companies like BAE Systems in Nashua, Antenna Research Associates, Cobham Advanced Electronic Solutions, and Spectrum Control, that idea has come up more times than I can count.

And for most of that time, it wasn’t true.

There were always real reasons it didn’t happen. You couldn’t digitize enough bandwidth, performance fell apart at higher frequencies, power became a problem, or it just wasn’t practical to build a system that way. So the RF chain stuck around. Not because it was ideal, but because there wasn’t a better option.

What feels different now is not that there’s been some single breakthrough, it’s that over the last several years, a lot of those limitations have been easing at the same time.

You can now digitize much wider portions of the spectrum than you used to. Not perfectly, but well enough that you don’t need as much analog processing just to make the signal usable. At the same time, systems are being designed less around specific frequency bands and more around capturing a wide chunk of spectrum and deciding later what matters.

That naturally pushes more functionality into software.

And from a practical standpoint, digital is just easier to live with. Analog solutions still work, but they’re sensitive. Layout matters, temperature matters, parts vary, and everything needs to be tuned and managed. Digital systems are a lot more forgiving. If something isn’t quite right, you can often fix it in code. If requirements change, you don’t necessarily have to redesign hardware.

There’s also been a shift in how imperfections are handled. It used to be that you tried to make the RF chain as clean as possible up front. Now there’s more willingness to accept that some of those imperfections can be corrected later, once the signal is digitized. That only works if you move into digital early enough, which is exactly what these newer architectures are doing.

The applications themselves are also pushing things in this direction. A lot of modern systems need broader awareness, being able to observe and process large portions of the spectrum at once without stepping through it. That kind of requirement doesn’t line up very well with a traditional, sequential RF chain. It fits much better with grabbing a wide chunk of data and handling it digitally.

And once you do that, it naturally opens the door to more adaptive behavior. You’re not locked into a fixed way of operating — you can decide in real time what matters, what to ignore, and how to respond.

None of this showed up overnight. It’s been building gradually for years. But when you step back and look at it from a system level, everything seems to be moving in the same direction, less reliance on long, complex RF chains, earlier transition into digital, and more flexibility once you get there.

This isn’t just something I’ve seen in architectures either, it’s influenced how I think about the field more generally. Over the last few years, I’ve found myself drifting away from work that’s heavily centered on traditional RF chains. Not as a hard decision, just a recognition that a lot of that work is tied to very specific implementations, specific bands, specific platforms, specific programs.

There’s still a lot of value there, but it feels like a narrower space than it used to be. From a systems perspective, the areas that seem to be opening up are the ones that are more flexible, more software-driven, and less dependent on complex analog processing.

That’s where most of the momentum seems to be.

I don’t think RF completely goes away. You still need a front end, you still have to interface with the physical world, and that part doesn’t change. But RF doesn’t feel like it defines the system anymore the way it used to. It’s starting to look more like a transition layer, something you move through as efficiently as possible on the way into the digital domain.

For most of my career, “RF is dead” was more of a talking point than anything real. But over the last five to ten years, the underlying changes have been adding up.

At this point, it’s not that RF suddenly stopped working. It’s that for the first time, we don’t need as much of it as we used to.

And once that starts to happen, the rest tends to follow.

Michael Schwarm is an engineer, business leader, and multi-instrumentalist with over 30 years of experience in the Aerospace and Defense sector. Bridging the gap between technical complexity and strategic execution, he holds a Master of Science in Systems Engineering from Johns Hopkins University and a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from the University of Connecticut. As a writer, Michael applies a systems engineering lens to explore the intersection of technology, business, culture, and narrative logic.