RF Engineer

Photo: joSon These days, in developed countries, you can’t so much as rent a car or buy a shirt without setting in motion a burst of digital information spanning hundreds of kilometers. Data stream toward a waiting credit card database through the air, over cables, and back again, bouncing and meeting interference, and encountering other […]

Image: Retro File; Image manipulation: Richard Tuschman More than a century ago, electrical engineering was so much simpler. Basically, it referred to the technical end of telegraphy, trolley cars, or electric power. Nevertheless, here and there members of that fledgling profession were quietly setting the stage for an era in industrial history unparalleled for its

This is the digital age. From flashy cell phones, games, PCs, and PDAs to the behind-the-scenes automotive, medical, and Internet components, progress in digital computing owes much to the software that helps designers create and connect millions of transistors. But with the trend toward mixed-signal chips in a communications-centric world, everyone is finding the need

Invention and Inventors: In Paris, shortly after World War II, two German scientists, Herbert Mataré (above) and Heinrich Welker, invented the “tran- sistron,” a solid-state amplifier remark- ably similar to the transistor developed by Bell Telephone Laboratories at about the same time. In this X-ray image of a commercial transistron built in the early 1950s,

Gilded skin: Takao Someya’s latest e-skin material is one-tenth the thickness of plastic kitchen wrap, and it can conform to any body shape. Photo: Someya-Sekitani Group A golden glove: In 2003, Someya’s lab used organic thin-film transistors to create its first flexible, bendable e-skin. Researchers wrapped the material around a mechanical hand to demonstrate the

Part one of a two-part report Photo: Zoriah Two platoons of U.S. Army scouts are in a field deep in the notorious “Triangle of Death” south of Baghdad, a region of countless clashes between Sunni insurgents and Shia militias. The platoons are guided by a local man who’s warned them of pressure-plate improvised explosive devices,

Has the computer become a black box, even to experienced electrical engineers? Will we be forever reliant upon large, opaque organizations to build them for us? Absolutely not, we say. And to prove our point, we built our very own laptop, from the circuit boards on up. Admittedly, we did not delude ourselves that we

Can you imagine keeping the same cell phone as you switch from one service provider to another to take advantage of deals and new phone service options? A new technology called software-defined radio could make that possible–of course, assuming that service providers choose to adopt it. As any reader of the business pages knows, the

Keeping aging systems on their feet is a daunting and resource-intensive task. The U.S. Air Force, for example, continually wages an internal battle to keep its weapons systems in fighting form. One enormous and often overlooked factor contributing to the early demise of military technologies is the problem of unavailable parts. Take the B-2 Spirit,

This is part of IEEE Spectrum’s Special Report: 25 Microchips That Shook the World. Gordon Moore Cofounder and chairman emeritus of Intel Photo: Intel Corp. There were lots of great chips, but one that will always be dear to me was the Intel 1103, the first commercial 1024-bit DRAM [introduced in 1970]. It was the