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Ahyar
Ahyar
Ahyar
Electronic engineering has long been a pioneering field, with its roots in ground-
breaking inventions in the late 19th and early 20th century including radio,
telephone and television. The modern day field has morphed into a diverse and
dynamic area, covering everything from mobile phones to robotics. In this article,
we take an incisive look at how the field emerged and what to expect in
employment, including the training and skills required.
Background
Electronic engineers are responsible for the design, development and testing of
devices, components or systems with an electrical power source. This area of
engineering is often viewed as a subfield of electrical engineering. The distinction
usually drawn between the two is the focus in electronic engineering on circuitry
and design of individual components of a device, whilst electrical engineering is
broader, centring on power generation and transmission. It is of note that many
universities have joint departments for electronic and electrical engineering, due
to their inherent interconnection.
The field owes it origins to a number of innovations that took place at the
end of the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries. These included the invention
of the radio — accredited to Guglielmo Marconi and Karl Ferdinand Braun by the
Nobel Prize committee in 1909 [1]. The related work In 1904 by Professor John
Ambrose Fleming, at University College London, who invented the first radio tube
— the diode. This was followed by the independent development of the amplifier
tube two years later, known as a triode, by Robert von Lieben and Lee De Forest.
The latter became incorporated into radios worldwide and allowed for long-
distance telephone calls.The subsequent invention of television, use and
development of communication systems like sonar and radar in World War II, and
the transistor in 1947, laid further foundations to the discipline. Other key 20th
century inventions include the microprocessor in 1969 by Marcian Edward (Ted)
Hoff, through his work at—what was then a small Silicon Valley start-up, Intel.
Microprocessors have become integral in personal computers, and have also
allowed for electronic technology development in any device that requires
computation power, for example. cars and mobile phones.
Electronic engineering, in the form it exists today, can include the conception and
design of electronic components and systems for a wide range of commercial,
industry, or scientific research applications. A graduate degree is usually a pre-
requisite for all entry-level roles. You can further specialise in sub-disciplines that
include control engineering, signal processing, telecommunications engineering,
computer engineering (including embedded systems) and instrumentation,
through further postgraduate study. The world’s top ranked academic research
centres for electronic engineering in 2017 included— Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (MIT), Stanford, University of California - Berkeley (UCB), University of
California - Los Angeles (UCLA), Cambridge University and the Nanyang
Technological University, Singapore [2].
International funding for research comes from a wide variety of sources, including
national research councils and additionally, industry funders, due in part to the
direct practical applications of projects. In the UK, the primary governmental
funding body is the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).
At the EU level, a number of relevant funding opportunities are available under
the current Horizon 2020 framework under its Industrial Leadership pillar
New Telecommunications Engineering MSc Programme to Support
Sector
The programme was designed with the primary goal of supplying the nation’s
telecoms sector with local professionals. The two-year programme was jointly
designed by AAIT and ethio telecom, and will cost approximately 23m Br over five
years (not counting laboratory equipment). Other partners in the design and
implementation of the project are Aalto University in Finland, and various Chinese
universities and telecoms companies.
For millennia, humans have observed animals performing physical feats that we
could not match. Insects and birds fly, horses run at high speeds with great
endurance, and fish survive their entire lives under water. Eventually we
mastered mechanical design and energy storage to the extent that we can mimic,
and in many cases surpass, the physical abilities of other animals.
It is, therefore, arguably the case that two of this century’s grandest scientific
challenges are to:
This special issue is, therefore, especially timely because these initiatives coincide
with tremendous progress recently in the field of computational neuroscience,
some of which has been specifically enabled by electrical, electronic, and
computer engineers. Many of these achievements are described in the papers of
the issue, as summarized in Section II. First, however, we discuss historical
context, as many readers may be unfamiliar with this field of research.
Before this, in the 1940s, Norbert Wiener and many colleagues developed an
interest in studying problems that are common to both biological organisms and
machines. In 1948, Wiener gave a name to this topic in his book Cybernetics: Or
Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine [2]. Chapter V of
Wiener’s book, “Computing Machines and the Nervous System,” discusses
computation in the brain in terms of the properties of neurons and synapses.
Other work by Wiener and his contemporaries was instrumental in the
development of modern control theory, which is today important in
understanding biological motor control in computational neuroscience (see, for
example, the papers by Kao et al., Franceschini , Sejnowski et al., and Stewart &
Eliasmith in this issue).
Going back further in time, famous names in the history of electrical engineering
also made seminal contributions in the discovery of electrical activity in the
nervous system, including Luigi Galvani, Alessandro Volta, and Hermann von
Helmholtz.
There is also some interesting history in this area within the Proceedings of the
IEEE. For example, in 1959, a paper entitled “What the frog’s eye tells the frog’s
brain,” by Lettvin, Maturanat, McCulloch, and Pitts was published in
the Proceedings of the IRE (the original name for the Proceedings of the IEEE) [3].
Another example from the same journal was the 1962 paper “An active pulse
transmission line simulating nerve axon,” by Nagumo, Arimoto, and Yoshizawa
[4], which articulated a model that was to become known as the “Fitzhugh–
Nagumo neuron model.”
More recently, electronic engineering intersected with computational
neuroscience in Carver Mead’s influential work on neuromorphic engineering,
described in his 1989 book Analog VLSI and Neural Systems [5]. This field of
research employs analog very large-scale integration (VLSI) electronic circuits to
mimic neurobiological circuitry. Mead and other pioneers of this field founded the
Telluride Neuromorphic Engineering Workshop, which has been meeting annually
since 1994. Twenty five years after Mead’s book, neuromorphic engineering
continues to flourish, as evidenced by papers in this special issue, such as those of
Benjamin et al., Hamilton et al., and Rahimi Azghadi et al.
Today, there are numerous research avenues that link study of the nervous
system with electronics, physics, mathematics, computer science, and technology.
Such research has been described using any number of names. When such
research has a scientific focus, it is labeled, for example, as computational
neuroscience, systems neuroscience, theoretical neuroscience, mathematical
neuroscience, neural modeling, neural coding, theoretical neurobiology, and
integrative neuroscience. This kind of research can also be thought of as a
subfield of computational biology or systems biology. Research with a dominant
engineering design focus has been called, for example, neuromorphic
engineering, neuro engineering, neurorobotics, and neural engineering.
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.[5][6] 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.)