Overview

In reflecting on these things one cannot help but be amazed at how short are the memories of many engineers and engineering faculties, and how often the battle to achieve these objectives needs to be refought. At the beginning of World War II, when engineers were presented the problem of developing radar, they were (except in very few cases) found woefully lacking in an ability to cope with such an unconventional situation; and physicists, both theoretical and experimental, had to be called in to do what was essentially an engineering job.

E. A. Guillemin (1962): Proc. IRE 50, 872 878

I hope things are now better than the quotation suggests, but it was penned not long ago by an eminent electronicist of the old school. As a physicist by training, I have found the knowledge that that has provided to be of immense help in the electronics field. This part is a brief introduction to some of the topics that seem relevant and which to some extent are missed out in the training of electronic engineers. It must of course be a rather brief foray into the realm of the physicist but it may give some encouragement to find out more, and will provide some insight into the roots from which the subject of electronics has grown. The move to much higher frequencies, the great advances in electro optics and the development of many new materials, including the manipulation of single atoms, means that some knowledge of physics is highly...