Electronics and photonics lead the way

摘要

This particular issue of the magazine features the Electronics and Photonics Division. This Division was formed on April 24, 1931 at the ECS meeting in Salt Lake City; but another two decades elapsed before it really started to grow. The invention of the transistor undoubtedly had a salutary role in this growth. Even the early days of electronics (i.e., the 1950s) featured close collaborations between physicists and electronics engineers. The subsequent boom in microelectronics in the 1960s and 1970s was underpinned by a remarkable situation where teams of physicists and electronics engineers were joined by materials scientists, chemists, and metallurgists working toward common goals that had relevance to both military and consumer applications. I want to return to this theme of collaboration later but many of these scientists and engineers wound up considering the Electronics Division and the Society as their primary "technical home." Two of the three areas of interest of the original Division (fluorescence and rare metals) were "spun off" to form the Luminescence and Display Materials Division in 1982 leaving behind the general electronics core. In the meantime, modern communications devices have increasingly integrated both electronic and photonic functions catalyzing a change of the Division's name from "Electronics" to "Electronics and Photonics" in 2005. Over the past fifteen years, the critical dimensions in electronic and photonic devices have dramatically shrunk to the nanometer size scale to usher in the era of nanoelectronics and nanophotonics. In my crystal ball, biology and medicine are two fields that will benefit from the revolutionary advances in electronics/photonics.