Toward a Global Society

Spurred by a dramatic thaw in international relations, the world became a much closer and more intimate place during the 1990s. The Cold War stumbled to a dramatic end in 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed after a bungled August coup. Germany was reunited after more than three decades of division, while China and Eastern Europe hastened to rejoin the world economy. Trade relations warmed as tariffs fell in many parts of the world.

At the throbbing heart of this expansion was a great boom in the computer, semiconductor and telecommunications industries that occurred in large part due to the impact of the Internet and World Wide Web upon business and everyday life. Improvements in computers and communications relied heavily upon advances in electron devices, and increasingly upon improved electro-optical devices. Market pressures for smaller, faster and better devices prodded these technologies onward. The miniaturization of microchip components continued its relentless march toward submicron dimensions - leading to microprocessors having millions of transistors and memory chips approaching gigabit storage capacities by the century's close. In part due to increasingly high costs, multinational microchip manufacturers began to form strategic alliances to develop products and technologies jointly. Semiconductor foundries also emerged, mainly in the Asia-Pacific region, providing manufacturing services to chip-design firms as well as established chipmakers. The semiconductor industry itself became increasingly globalized.

During the 1990s, one increasingly began to encounter the terms "nanoscale" and "nanotechnology," as it became possible to envision producing device features - and perhaps even entire electron devices - that could be measured in tens of nanometers. Prior to this decade, such possibilities had been largely regarded as science fiction. But after the discovery of spherical carbon-60 molecules and cylindrical carbon nanotubes, as well as the development by various research groups of single-electron transistors, these ideas no longer seemed so far-fetched. Features were beginning to approach the size where the quantum-mechanical behavior of electrons could not be ignored any more.

As the third millennium began, the impact of electron devices upon modern life was impressive indeed. During the previous decade, the world had effectively become much smaller and faster paced, due in large part to light-speed voice-and-data communications over global networks of copper and glass, which owed their very existence to electron and electro-optical devices. Broadband satellite and wireless communications relied heavily on these devices, too. And the march of miniaturization continued toward device features at and even below the 100 nanometer scale - much smaller than the wavelength of visible light. As the number of components on microchips continued to double every 18 months it seemed inevitable that this relentless progress would continue for at least another decade.

Exercise 5

Answer the following questions.

1. What political events happened at the beginning of 1990s?

2. How did those changes influence the world economy and industry?

3. What was the basis for the development of electronic devices?

4. Why did microchip manufacturers begin to unite?

5. Where did major semiconductor producers develop the most rapidly?

6. What new terms appeared in 1990s?

7. Had the devices of 1990s been considered real in previous decades?

8. What discoveries made the ideas of nanotechnology real and close?

9. How did electronic devices influence the world at the end of the second millenium?

10. What was the tendency about chips?

LESSON 7

Exercise 1

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

Provided, provision, providing, provider, reflect, reflector, reflecting, reflective, reflection, reflected, non-reflected, contribute, contributor, contributing, contributory, contributions, converse, conversely, conversion, convertible, convertibility, reconvert, recognise, recognition, recognising, unrecognised, illustration, illustrate, illustrating, illustrious, conclude, concluding, concluded, conclusion, conclusive, inconclusive, fabricate, fabricated, fabrication, explicit, explicitly, confine, confining, confined, confinement, perform, performed, performing, performance, inform, informing, information, invent, inventive, invented, invention, innovations, innovative, innovate, innovator.

Exercise 2

Translate the following sentences paying attention to gerunds.

1. In a DRAM, data is stored by charging the capacitor in a memory cell. 2. Typical off-line error-recovery techniques include: attempting to read the data on a second disk revolution; reading the data by positioning the read/write head slightly off track. 3. The wireless industry has lots of experience in responding to customer demands. 4. Local-area networks establish communication links by limiting the distance between transmitter and receiver. 5. The mesh architecture helps keep signal strength up by replacing single long radio links with multiple short ones. 6. The subscriber units are roof-mounted, but have no need for careful antenna siting and aiming. 7. The company makes money not by manufacturing the devices, but by developing enabling technologies and licensing them to other companies. 8. The discs will be capable of storing as much as 270 minutes of compressed digital video. 9. The company has an open-minded approach to research, but it is concentrating on solving problems in electroluminescence. 10.So, scanning a laser beam over the structure generates a series of pulses. 11.The technique depends on combining two separate methods for reading and storing data – a multilayer method that allows data to be stored and read in three dimensions in the disk and wavelength multiplexing. 12. Using the set of three identical Varicaps gives a 1.8:1 tuning ratio in all three sub-bands. 13. Mode-switching affects the current flowing in the output devices, but the output voltage is controlled by the global feedback loop, and switching is completely silent in operation. 14. The mode is switchable while the amplifier is handling audio, allowing some interesting A/B listening tests. 15.Tuning of the second detector is carried out in the same way, but the signal is fed to the directional coupler output.

Exercise 3

Match Ukrainian translations to the following English phrases.

1. via satellite	1. вуглецеві нанотрубки
2. cellular phones	2. великі масиви
3. to churn away	3. від джерела до стоку
4. semiconductor heterostructures	4. через супутник
5. nanoscale devices	5. наноелектромеханічні системи
6. are trapped around a single point	6. кремнієвий маятник
7. level of atmospheric pollutants	7. поєднати гетероструктури
8. nanoelectromechanical systems	8. обмежені рухом навколо однієї точки
9. from source to drain	9. стільникові телефони
10. silicon pendulum	10. межі електронних приладів
11. to mate heterostructures	11. виконувати
12. the electron-device frontiers	12. молекули на основі вуглецю
13. large arrays	13. нанорозмірні прилади
14. carbon nanotubes	14. рівень забруднювачів атмосфери
15. custom-designed	15. напівпровідникові гетероструктури
16. carbon-based molecules	16. cконструйовані на замовлення

Exercise 4

Pay attention to translation of the following phrases.

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