  For many decades High Energy Physics (HEP) instrumentation has been
concentrated on detectors of ionizing radiation -- where the energy of incident
particles or photons is sufficient to create mobile charge in gas, liquid, or
solid material, which can be processed by front end electronics (FEE) to
provide information about the position, energy, and timing of the incident
radiation. However, recently-proposed HEP experiments need to sense or control
EM radiation in the radiofrequency (RF) range, where ionization detectors are
unavailable. These experiments can take advantage of emerging microelectronics
developments fostered by the explosive growth of wireless data communications
in the commercial sector.
  Moore's Law advances in semiconductor technology have brought about the
recent development of advanced microelectronic components with groundbreaking
levels of analog-digital integration and processing speed. In particular, RF
"System-on-Chip" (RFSoC) platforms offer multiple data converter interfaces to
the analog world (ADCs and DACs) having bandwidths approaching 10GHz and
abundant digital signal processing resources on the same silicon die. Such
devices eliminate the complex PC board interfaces that have long been used to
couple discrete ADCs and DACs to FPGA processors, thus radically reducing power
consumption, impedance mismatch, and footprint area, while allowing analog
preconditioning circuits to be eliminated in favor of digital processing.
Costed for wide deployment, these devices are helping to accelerate the trend
towards "software defined radio" in several high-volume commercial markets. In
this whitepaper we highlight some HEP applications where leading-edge RF
microelectronics can be a key enabler.
