The role of basic research in communications and electronics

Abstract

While communications and electronics are among today’s most highly developed engineering disciplines, they have always been closely associated with, and almost products of, revolutions in science and fundamental research. Conceptually, Maxwell’s field equations are the solid basis of communications engineering as we know it today. And directly behind the amazing development of electronics lies another great revolution in scientific thought, the hypothesis and discovery of the electron. From this research concept, we can closely trace many ingenious engineering developments such as the diode, triode, and pentode vacuum tubes. Most recently we have seen the massive innovating impact of quantum mechanics on these two fields. Solidstate engineering, a direct result of quantum mechanical descriptions of matter, has become a complete new engineering field from which have already come whole device families such as the transistor. Now arriving on the scene, again derived directly from quantum mechanics, are the masers and lasers which hold much promise in both communications and electronics. It is surely no accident that communications and electronics, the two most rapidly growing engineering fields have from their inception remained so close to basic science. Today, for example, this close relationship continues with statistical mechanics, thermodynamic concepts, and information theory offering new engineering opportunities and challenges to device and systems designers. We can foresee the continuing hand-in-hand partnership of the research scientist and the engineer in creating ever smaller functional elements, microminiaturized computing and control devices, and almost infinitesimal packages and interconnections. Engineers, drawing on the latest scientific studies, will certainly extend coherent radiation into shorter and shorter wavelengths, and then find ways to modulate these wavelengths, or use higher and higher frequencies, and so fully utilize our communications channels.