Solid State Era

In 1947 physicists William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter H. Brattain of Bell Telephone Laboratories demonstrated the point contract transistor an amplifier constructed entirely of solid state materials with no requirement for a vacuum glass envelope or heater voltage for the filament.
Although reluctant at first due to the vast amount of  material available on the design analysis and synthesis of tube networks the industry eventually accepted this new technology as the wave of the future. In 1958 the first integrated circuit (IC)  was developed at texas instruments and in 1961 the first commercial integrated circuit was manufactured by the fairchild  Corporation.

It is impossible to review properly the entire history of the electrical/electronics field in a few pages. The effort here , both through the discussion and the time graphs in was to reveal the amazing progress of this field in the last 50 years. The growth appears to be truly exponential since the early 1900, raising the interesting question . Where do we go from here? The time chart suggest that the next few decades will probably contain many important innovative contributions that may cause an even faster growth curve than we are now experiencing.

     
     Measurement

  One of the most important rules to remember and apply when working in any field of technology is to use the correct units when substituting numbers into an equation. Too often we are so inter on obtaining a numerical solution that we overlook cheeking the units associated with numbers being substituted into an equation . Results obtained therefore are often meaningless. Consider for example the following very fundamental physics equation:

                              v=d/t
                             
                                    v=velocity
                                    d= distance
                                    t=time

        Assume , for the moment that the following data are obtained for a moving object:


                                     d=4000ft
                                      t=1min

  The numerical value substituting into an equation must have the unit of measurement specified by the equation.


The next equation is normally , how do i convert the distance and time to the proper unit of measurement? A method is presented in section of this lesion ,but for now it is given that

                                    1mi=5280ft
                                4000ft=0.76mi
                                        1=1/60h 


                                     v=d/t
                                     v=0.76/0.017
                                    v=44.71h