History

The history of electronic engineering is a long one. Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary (1972) defines electronics as "The science and technology of the conduction of electricity in a vacuum, a gas, or a semiconductor, and devices based thereon".

Electronic engineering as a profession sprang from technological improvements in the telegraph industry during the late 19th century and in the radio and telephone industries during the early 20th century. People gravitated to radio, attracted by the technical fascination it inspired, first in receiving and then in transmitting. Many who went into broadcasting in the 1920s had become "amateurs" in the period before World War I. The modern discipline of electronic engineering was to a large extent born out of telephone-, radio-, and television-equipment development and the large amount of electronic-systems development during World War II of radar, sonar, communication systems, and advanced munitions and weapon systems. In the interwar years, the subject was known as radio engineering. The word electronics began to be used in the 1940s In the late 1950s the term electronic engineering started to emerge.

The electronic laboratories (Bell Labs in the United States for instance) created and subsidized by large corporations in the industries of radio, television, and telephone equipment, began churning out a series of electronic advances. In 1948 came the transistor and in 1960 the integrated circuit, which would revolutionize the electronic industry. In the UK, the subject of electronic engineering became distinct from electrical engineering as a university-degree subject around 1960. (Before this time, students of electronics and related subjects like radio and telecommunications had to enroll in the electrical engineering department of the university as no university had departments of electronics. Electrical engineering was the nearest subject with which electronic engineering could be aligned, although the similarities in subjects covered (except mathematics and electromagnetism) lasted only for the first year of three-year courses.)

Electronic engineering (even before it acquired the name) facilitated the development of many technologies including wireless telegraphy, radio, television, radar, computers and microprocessors.

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Engineering Components

Component engineering is an engineering discipline primarily used to ensure the availability of suitable components required to manufacture a larger product.

The term combines two ideas:

• A component—a smaller, self-contained part of a larger entity

• Engineering—the discipline and profession of applying science to implement some functional design

Those who practice this discipline are called component engineers. Component engineers typically select, qualify, approve, document, and manage purchased components and direct material required to produce an end product. Component engineers typically analyze and qualify interchangeable parts from sources (vendors) outside their organization. Because of the high number of components used in electronic assemblies, component engineering is closely associated with design and manufacture.

Component engineering can also refer to the manufacturer of selected equipment used in theatrical motion picture projection. This equipment falls into two categories: units that automatically control the presentation and those that comprise part of the sound system.

Component engineering also involves product lifecycle management, that is to know when a component is going to be obsolete or to analyse the form–fit–functionality changes in the component.

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Telecommunications

Telecommunication occurs when the exchange of information between two or more entities (communication) includes the use of technology. Communication technology uses channels to transmit information (as electrical signals), either over a physical medium (such as signal cables), or in the form of electromagnetic waves. The word is often used in its plural form, telecommunications, because it involves many different technologies.

Early means of communicating over a distance included visual signals, such as beacons, smoke signals, semaphore telegraphs, signal flags, and optical heliographs. Other examples of pre-modern long-distance communication included audio messages such as coded drumbeats, lung-blown horns, and loud whistles. Modern technologies for long-distance communication usually involve electrical and electromagnetic technologies, such as telegraph, telephone, and teleprinter, networks, radio, microwave transmission, fiber optics, and communications satellites.

A revolution in wireless communication began in the first decade of the 20th century with the pioneering developments in radio communications by Guglielmo Marconi, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1909. Other highly notable pioneering inventors and developers in the field of electrical and electronic telecommunications include Charles Wheatstone and Samuel Morse (telegraph), Alexander Graham Bell (telephone), Edwin Armstrong, and Lee de Forest (radio), as well as Vladimir K. Zworykin, John Logie Baird and Philo Farnsworth (television).

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Industrial Process Control

Process control is an engineering discipline that deals with architectures, mechanisms and algorithms for maintaining the output of a specific process within a desired range. For instance, the temperature of a chemical reactor may be controlled to maintain a consistent product output.

Process control is extensively used in industry and enables mass production of consistent products from continuously operated processes such as oil refining, paper manufacturing, chemicals, power plants and many others. Process control enables automation, by which a small staff of operating personnel can operate a complex process from a central control room.

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Computers And Digital Electronic

In computer science, a digital electronic computer is a computer machine which is both an electronic computer and a digital computer. Examples of a digital electronic computers include the IBM PC, the Apple Macintosh as well as modern smartphones. When computers that were both digital and electronic appeared, they displaced almost all other kinds of computers, but computation has historically been performed in various non-digital and non-electronic ways: the Lehmer sieve is an example of a digital non-electronic computer, while analog computers are examples of non-digital computers which can be electronic (with analog electronics), and mechanical computers are examples of non-electronic computers (which may be digital or not). An example of a computer which is both non-digital and non-electronic is the ancient Antikythera mechanism found in Greece. All kinds of computers, whether they are digital or analog, and electronic or non-electronic, can be Turing complete if they have sufficient memory. A digital electronic computer is not necessarily a programmable computer, a stored program computer, or a general purpose computer, since in essence a digital electronic computer can be built for one specific application and be non-reprogrammable. As of 2014, most personal computers and smartphones in people's homes that use multicore central processing units (such as AMD FX, Intel Core i7, or the multicore varieties of ARM-based chips) are also parallel computers using the MIMD (multiple instructions - multiple data) paradigm, a technology previously only used in digital electronic supercomputers. As of 2014, most digital electronic supercomputers are also cluster computers, a technology that can be used at home in the form of small Beowulf clusters. Parallel computation is also possible with non-digital or non-electronic computers. An example of a parallel computation system using the abacus would be a group of human computers using a number of abacus machines for computation and communicating using natural language.

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Power Electronics

Power electronics expression is used to distinguish the type of application that is given to electronic devices, in this case to transform and control voltages and currents significant levels. It differentiates this type of application and other electronics called low power or too weak currents

In this application the electrical and electronics are reunited, allowing for control electronic circuits for controlling driving (on and off) power semiconductors to handle currents and voltages in power applications is used. This to form teams called static power converters.

Thus, the power electronics can adapt and transform electrical energy for various purposes such as a controlled power other equipment, transform electrical energy continuously to AC or vice versa, and control the speed and operation of electrical machines, etc. by using electronic devices, especially semiconductor. This includes applications in control systems, systems for power factor compensation and / or harmonic electric supply to industrial consumers or the interconnection of power systems of different frequency.

The main objective of this discipline is the handling and transformation of energy in an efficient manner, so avoiding use resistive elements generating potential Joule losses. The main devices are used by both coils and capacitors and semiconductors working in cut / saturation (on / off, on and off) mode.

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