Evolution of Electronics Technology: We are just 119 years old

With the evolution of Technology to which Electronics Engineering has played a very significant role, it has become possible for any individual from one corner of the planet to talk to another individual at other corner in just a fraction of a second.

Word Electronics comes from Electron which was first discovered by Sir J. J. Thomson in 1897. So, that clearly means we did not know the basic principles related to Electronics before 1897.

But once this concept was unveiled, there had been no looking back. During times of First and Second World Wars technology took quite an advanced shape. During those days technology components were mainly taken care of by concepts of Vacuum Tubes like Diodes (not semiconductor diodes), Triodes, Tetrodes and Pentodes. These electronic components were not only bulky but also very slow in operation.

A major milestone in this direction was achieved when a team of scientists comprising of Shockley, Bardeen and Walter conceptualized the prototype of a component called 'Transistor' in 1947 (year of Independence for India!). This single electronic component revolutionized the whole electronic industry and we started having different stages of Integrated Circuits(ICs) from 1958 onwards.

Comparing Vacuum Tube with Semiconductor Transistor and Integrated Circuit
(Source - https://www.quora.com/)

Engineers learnt packing more and more no. of transistors on a single silicon chip (1 square cm of area only). Starting from about 8 components a chip, the number has now increased to millions of components on the same area.

Not only the size of electronic components has reduced to micrometer size of dimensions, speed and efficiency has improved significantly.

Those born in early 1990s would be able to easily correlate the use of first generation of Nokia 3310 mobile phones which were expensive and had very limited features like just voice or text. Mobile phones of today have got all the state of the art features with significantly high computing power than their predecessors and that too at a much lower price.

Evolution of Mobile Phones

It is said about the direction of research in Electronics that -

1. Make the size of devices as small as possible no matter whatsoever is their current size today.
2. Make the devices as fast as possible no matter whatsoever is their current speed today.
3. Make the devices more and more power efficient no matter whatsoever is their power consumption today.

It is believed that with engineering branches getting more interdisciplinary in nature, future of technology is going to be extremely bright and we are going to definitely draw an immense benefit out of it.

By Dr. Rajnish Sharma, Dean Academics, Chitkara University, Himachal Pradesh