Electronics: The History of Electronics The Vacuum Tube Era
Electronics: The History of Electronics The Vacuum Tube Era
Electronics: The History of Electronics The Vacuum Tube Era
Electronics, branch of physics and electrical engineering that deals with the
emission, behaviour, and effects of electrons and with electronic devices.
Electronics encompasses an exceptionally broad range of technology. The
term originally was applied to the study of electron behaviour and movement,
particularly as observed in the first electron tubes. It came to be used in its
broader sense with advances in knowledge about the fundamental nature of
electrons and about the way in which the motion of these particles could be
utilized. Today many scientific and technical disciplines deal with different
aspects of electronics. Research in these fields has led to the development of
such key devices as transistors, integrated circuits, lasers, and optical fibres.
These in turn have made it possible to manufacture a wide array of electronic
consumer, industrial, and military products. Indeed, it can be said that the
world is in the midst of an electronic revolution at least as significant as the
industrial revolution of the 19th century.
This article reviews the historical development of electronics, highlighting
major discoveries and advances. It also describes some key electronic
functions and the manner in which various devices carry out these functions.
At the time of Thomsons work, the American inventor Thomas A. Edison had
observed a bluish glow in some of his early lightbulbs under certain conditions
and found that a current would flow from one electrode in the lamp to another
if the second one (anode) were made positively charged with respect to the
first (cathode). Work by Thomson and his students and by the English
engineer John Ambrose Fleming revealed that this so-called Edison
effect was the result of the emission of electrons from the cathode, the hot
filament in the lamp. The motion of the electrons to the anode, a metal
plate, constituted an electric current that would not exist if the anode were
negatively charged.
Vacuum tubes are fragile and ultimately wear out in service. Failure occurs in
normal usage either from the effects of repeated heating and cooling as
equipment is switched on and off (thermal fatigue), which ultimately causes a
physical fracture in some part of the interior structure of the tube, or
from degradation of the properties of the cathode by residual gases in the
tube. Vacuum tubes also take time (from a few seconds to several minutes) to
warm up to operating temperaturean inconvenience at best and in some
cases a serious limitation to their use. These shortcomings motivated
scientists at Bell Laboratories to seek an alternative to the vacuum tube and
led to the development of the transistor.
The semiconductor revolution
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By mid-1986 memory ICs with a capacity of 262,144 bits (binary digits) were
available. In fact, Gordon E. Moore, one of the founders of Intel, observed as
early as 1965 that the complexity of ICs was approximately doubling every
1824 months, which was still the case in 2000. This empirical Moores law
is widely used in forecasting the technological requirements for manufacturing
future ICs (seefigure).
Compound semiconductor materials
Many semiconductor materials other than silicon and germanium exist, and
they have different useful properties. Silicon carbide is
a compound semiconductor, the only one composed of two elements from
column IV of the periodic table. It is particularly suited for making devices for
specialized high-temperature applications. Other compounds formed by
combining elements from column III of the periodic tablesuch as aluminum,
gallium, and indiumwith elements from column Vsuch as phosphorus,
arsenic, and antimonyare of particular interest. These so-called III-V
compounds are used to make semiconductor devices that emit light efficiently
or that operate at exceptionally high frequencies.
Except for silicon carbide, these compounds have the same crystal structure.
This makes possible the gradation of composition, and thus the properties, of
the semiconductor material within one continuous crystalline body. Modern
material-processing techniques allow these compositional changes to be
controlled accurately on an atomic scale.
The core of early optical fibres was of such a diameter (several micrometres
[m], or about one-tenth the diameter of a human hair) that the various rays
of light in the core could travel in slightly different paths, the shortest directly
down the axis and other longer paths wandering back and forth across the
core. This limited the maximum distance that a pulse of light could travel
without becoming unduly spread by the time it arrived at the receiving end of
the fibre, with the central ray arriving first and others later. In a digital
communications system, successive pulses can overlap one another and be
indistinguishable at the receiving end. Such fibres are called multimode fibres,
in reference to the various paths (or modes) that the light can follow.
During the late 1970s, fibres were made with smaller core diameters in which
the light was constrained to follow only one path. This occurs if the core has a
diameter a little larger than the wavelength of the light traveling in iti.e.,
about 10 to 15 m (0.01 to 0.015 mm, or 0.0004 to 0.0006 inch). These
single-mode fibres avoid the difficulty described above. By 1993 optical fibres
capable of carrying light signals more than 215 km (135 miles) became
available. Such distance records have become obsolete with the use of
specialized fibres that incorporate integralamplifying features. Fibres
employing these optical amplifiers carry light signals over transoceanic
distances without the conventional pulse regeneration measures that were
needed in the past.
Optical fibres have several advantages over copper wires or coaxial cables.
They can carry information at a much higher rate, they occupy less space (an
important feature in large cities and in buildings), and they are quite
insensitive to electrical noise. Moreover, it is virtually impossible to make
unauthorized connections to them. Costs, initially high, have dropped to the
point where most new installations of telephone circuits between switching
centres and over longer distances consist of optical fibres.
Given the fact that communication signals arrive at a central switching office in
optical form, it has been attractive to consider switching them from one route
to another by optical means rather than electrically, as is done today. The
distances between central offices in most cases are substantially shorter than
the distance light can travel within a fibre. Optical switching would make
unnecessary the detection and regeneration of the light signals, steps that are
currently required. Such optical central-office switches are ready for
installation today and will further advance the dramatic changes wrought by
the use of light waves rather than electrons.
Two approaches can be envisioned. In one, all the integrated circuits are
placed as close together as possible to minimize the distances that signals
must travel. This creates a cooling problem, because the integrated circuits
generate heat. In the other possible approach, all the paths for signals are
made equal to the longest path. This requires the use of much more wire,
because most paths are longer than they would otherwise be. All this wire
takes space, which means that the integrated circuits have to be placed
farther apart than is preferable.
Ultimately, as computers operate even faster, neither approach will work, and
a radically new technique must be used. Optical communication between
integrated circuits is one possible answer. Light beams do not take up space
or interfere with cooling air. If the communication is optical, then the
computation might be done optically as well. Optical computation will require a
radically different form of integrated circuit, which can in principle be made of
gallium arsenide and related III-V compounds. These matters are currently
under serious study in research laboratories.
Superconducting electronics
Numerous metals completely lose their resistance to the flow of electric
current at temperatures approaching absolute zero (0 K, 273 C, or 460 F)
and become superconducting. Other equally dramatic changes in electrical
properties occur as well. One of these is the Josephson effect, named for the
British physicist Brian D. Josephson, who predicted and then discovered the
phenomenon in 1962. The Josephson effect governs the passage of current
from one superconducting metal to another through a very thin insulating film
between them (the Josephson junction) and the effects of small magnetic
fields on this current.
Josephson junction devices change from one electrical state to another in
extraordinarily short times, offering the possibility of producing
superconducting microcircuits that operate faster than any other kind known.
Serious efforts have been made to construct a computer on this basis, but
most of the projects have been either discontinued or sharply cut back
because of technical difficulties. Interest in the approach has also waned
because of increases in the speed of III-V semiconductor microcircuits.
Flat-panel displays
Display devices convey information in visible form from electronic devices to
human viewers. Common examples are the faces on digital watches,
numerical indicators on stereo equipment, and the picture tubes
in television sets and computer monitors. Until recently the most versatile of
these has been the picture tube, which can present numbers, letters, graphs,
and both still and moving pictures. While picture tubes set a very high
standard of performance and provide bright colour images, they are bulky,
heavy, and expensive. Designers of television receivers have long desired a
display device having the virtues of the picture tube but fewer of the
disadvantages, so that a picture on the wall television set can be produced.
Displays that produce images are patterned with myriads of tiny picture
elements that can be electrically activated independently to produce patterns
of light and dark or arbitrary forms. Superposed colour filters having arrays of
elements corresponding to those in the display permit the formation of colour
images of a quality rivaling that of colour cathode-ray tube displays. Such
displays are used as viewing devices for television sets, computers, and video
and digital cameras.
A great amount of effort is being expended to increase the size and decrease
the cost of flat-panel displays, because the potential market for them is clearly
substantial. Much of the reduction in cost is obtained through experience in
manufacturing, where low yields attributable to defects in the patterns have
been a major problem.