Just what is electronics?

Just what is electronics?
One of the things that has always been comfortable about the engineering profession was that it lived within a well-defined domain. But that is about to change because developments in monolithic electro-optical systems design are threatening to upset this orderly world.

Electronics engineers design circuits using transistors and passive components in which voltage or current changes carry information. And digital designers live in a world in which it is assumed that there are pre-defined circuits that exactly implement abstract logic functions so they can focus on combinatorial and sequential design in nearly complete innocence of the underlying electronics.

New branches of physical science that are not even taught to today's electronics graduates are becoming significant. One obvious example is provided by the explosion in monolithic optical devices.

Photodiodes have been around for a long time, particularly to provide the sensory element in CCD arrays. There has also been the relative curiosity of micromachine optical components, such as the TI micromirror array, now widely used in projection displays and about to break into more interesting applications.

We are on the verge of a watershed of integrated, monolithic electro-optical systems that will traverse many technological wrinkles, including micromirrors and micro-machined movable gratings, because of the very large checks the networking industry is waving under the noses of optical-systems designers.

Eventually, of course, a layer of device developers will emerge to encapsulate the new devices in libraries and make them available to ordinary logic designers. But that won't be the first step.

First, we will need engineers who are conversant in micromachine design and electronic device development. Such engineers are likely to be rare, and soon-to-be, I predict, rather wealthy.

But where to find them? Do we plead with universities-not the most flexible institutions in the best of times-to include programs in physical chemistry and optics that today lie completely outside the schools of engineering?

Do we send senior engineers back for specialized physics and chemistry courses? Or, do we depend on multi-disciplinary teams to complete these new chip designs (I suspect the latter is the least desirable but most likely solution)?

Designing such chips will require a new type of engineer-one who can work equally well in microelectronics and one of the micro-physical disciplines. Finding those people will be the challenge.