New Light on Electron Devices

As the 1970s began, there was strong and growing interest among electrical engineers and materials scientists in the new field of opto-electronics. It arose largely in response to the invention of the semiconductor laser during the previous decade. Devices that emit, convert or detect light became a focus of extensive activity among members of the Electron Devices Group. Visual electronic displays were another; the charge-coupled device, or CCD, revealed at IEEE meetings in 1970, was an instantaneous sensation. Devices that generate and absorb electromagnetic radiation had, of course, been used since the beginning of the century, but the major emphasis was now on the visible and infrared portions of the spectrum. The promise of broadband communications via networks of glass fibers soon became a potent force driving research and development efforts.

Solid-state integrated circuits, then becoming widely known as microchips, was another area of major activity, as component densities continued to follow the exponential growth curve enunciated by Moore in the mid-1960s. It was in fact the planar techniques used in the manufacture of MOS field-effect transistors that had made CCDs possible. In 1970 Marcian Hoff, working at the Intel Corporation, invented the microprocessor - in effect, a complete computer on a single chip of silicon. This was also the year that the sobriquet "Silicon Valley" was coined to describe California's Santa Clara Valley, which had become the global epicenter of the semiconductor industry. And in that very same year President Nixon awarded Jack Kilby the National Medal of Science for his pioneering work on integrated circuits.

Hand-held pocket calculators also emerged in the early 1970s, based upon a single microprocessor and a semiconductor memory chip. They created a rapidly growing demand for numeric displays that was satisfied by light-emitting diodes and organic liquid-crystal displays - electron devices that had been invented and developed during the previous decade. Some calculators were even powered by silicon photovoltaic cells; this was one of the first successful commercial applications of these semiconductor devices, which had been introduced in 1954.

The component densities of microchips, in the dawning era of very large-scale integration (VLSI), continued their relentless exponential climb. Introduced at the beginning of the decade, dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) chips by 1979 contained over 100,000 transistors and offered 64Kbits of memory. But one could still foresee a day in the not-distant-future when there would be millions of transistors on a single microchip.

Unwilling to wait that long, however, computer hobbyists had already seized upon the Altair 8800 microcomputer, whose architecture was built around an Intel 8bit microprocessor. Two of them - Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak - had even founded their own brash new microcomputer company, the Apple Computer Company, in a Silicon Valley garage. That very same September of 1977 the company began selling the Apple II personal computer. The world would never be the same again.

Exercise 5

Answer the following questions.

1. What devices caused great interest to opto-electronics?

2. Why did scientists and engineers become interested in visible and infra-red portions of the spectrum?

3. How were solid-state integrated circuits called in 1970s?

4. What made CCDs possible?

5. Who introduced microprocessor?

6. What does the name “ Silicon Valley” mean?

7. When and why did Jack Kilby receive the National Medal of Science?

8. What devices invented in previous decades were used in pocket calculators?

9. How had DRAM chips changed by the end of the decade?

10. Where was the Apple Computer Company founded?

11. When did it start selling its first personal computer?

LESSON 5

Exercise 1

Translate the following words paying attention to word-building affixes.

Event, eventful, eventuate, eventual, eventuality, eventually; compete, competition, competitor, competitive, competitioner, competitively; deep, deepen, deeply, deepness, depth, deepening; widely, wide, widen, nationwide, widening, widespread; share, sharing, shareholder, share-out, shared; connect, connecting, connector, connection, connected, interconnection; dense, density, densely, densimeter; face, faced, facing, facial, interface, interfacing; transform, transformer, transforming, transformed, transformation.

Exercise 2

Translate the following sentences paying attention to infinitives.

1. Among the first to benefit from the new laser will be astronomers. 2.Certain GaAs layers throughout the active regions are doped to give them a positive dielectric constant. 3. What little radiation such lasers produced tended to be absorbed by the semiconductor materials. 4. For a solid-state laser to produce light, electrons in the laser material must be forced to release protons by dropping from one energy level to the next. 5. To produce light of a specific frequency the electron jump within the material must match the energy of the protons. 6. Microsoft and Intel hope to use their marketing experience and computer expertise to get big money from the emerging market for broadband mobile phones. 7. Spadd (smart passive damping devices) was developed to protect satellites from vibration during launch. 8. As every computer user knows, software is far more likely than hardware to fail. 9. In order to develop a modular product architecture with standardized interfaces among subsystems, it is necessary to waste some of the functionality that is theoretically possible. 10.The specification seeks to standardise output range - likely to be 0.5V to 4.5V - and the supply voltage, probably at 5V. 11. The 256 Mbyte d-ram project seems to be not the only area in which the three companies are willing to co-operate to share cost and expertise. 12. It turned out to be possible to measure a reflection coefficient of 0.06 to an accuracy of about 10 %. 13. Two diodes are considered to have been selected in a pair if their forward resistances coincide in three points (in the three sub-bands) to within 5%. 14. No-one working in the field expects molecular devices to be fabricated by processes like vapour deposition or etching. 15. So far, most candidate molecules tend to be unstable or difficult to interface. 16. This causes the rising edges of a sine wave signal to be expanded, while the falling edges are compressed. 17. But who will win remains to be seen.

Exercise 3

Match Ukrainian translations to the following English phrases.

1. oil embargo	1. судова постанова
2. to corner the consumer market	2. відповідна галузь
3. judicial decree	3. субмікронні масштаби
4. long-distance telephone carrier	4. заборона на імпорт нафти з країни
5. “Baby Bell”	5. захопити споживчий ринок
6. respective domain	6. філія компанії “Белл”
7. submicron scales	7. відбуватися
8. to be underway	8.оператор міжміського телефонного зв’язку

Exercise 4

Pay attention to translation of the following phrases.

1. to be on the ropes -	відчувати обмеження;
2. to challenge the hegemony that the two behemots had once enjoyed - претендувати на провідне становище, що колись належало двом гігантам;
3. to champion the goal -	прагнути до мети;
4. to be on much better footings -	знаходитись у значно кращому становищі.

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