Topic 2. Development of electronics

Electronics is a field of engineering and applied physics deal­ing with the design and application of electronic circuits. The operation of circuits depends on the flow of electrons for gen­eration, transmission, reception and storage of information.

Today it is difficult to imagine our life without electronics. It surrounds us everywhere. Electronic devices are widely used in scientific research and industrial designing, they control the work of plants and power stations, calculate the trajectories of space-ships and help the people discover new phenomena of nature. Automatization of production processes and studies on living organisms became possible due to electronics.

The invention of vacuum tubes at the beginning of the 20^th century was the starting point of the rapid growth of modern electronics. Vacuum tubes assisted in manipulation of signals. The development of a large variety of tubes designed for spe­cialized functions made possible the progress in radio commu­nication technolbgy before the World War II and in the creation of early computers during and shortly after the war.

The transistor invented by American scientists W.Shpckly, J.Bardeen and W.Brattain in 1948 completely replaced the vac-uum tube. The transistor, a small piece of a semiconductor with three electrodes, had great advantages over the best vacuum tubes. It provided the same functions as the vacuum tube but at reduced weight, cost, power consumption, and with high reli­ability. With the invention of the transistor all essential circuit functions could be carried out inside solid bodies. The aim of creating electronic circuits with entirely solid-state components had finally been realized. Early transistors could respond at a rate of a few million times a second. This was fast enough to serve in radio circuits, but far below the speed needed for high­speed computers or for microwave communication systems.

The progress in semiconductor technology led to the devel­opment of the integrated circuit (1C), which was discovered due to the efforts of John Kilby in 1958. There appeared a new field of science — integrated electronics. The essence of it is batch processing. Instead of making, testing and assembling deserete components on a chip one at a time, large groupings of these components together with their interconnections were made all at a time. 1C greatly reduced the size of devices, lowered man­ufacturing costs and at the same time they provided high speed and increased reliability.