Just over 100 years have passed since the first radio transmission by Marconi in 1895. Today, electronics - loosely defined as the design and application of electron devices - have impacted our lives in many ways.

We daily encounter electronics in the form of telephones, radio, and television. Electronics can be found in many household appliances as well. The corporate world relies heavily on data processing, and manufacturing relies on electronic systems for process control. In fact, it is hard to imagine a computer industry evolving without the use of electronics.

At the turn of the twentieth century, however, there were no commercial electron devices. In 1902, the diode vacuum tube was invented, and in 1907, the triode tube followed. The electron tube era enabled rapid circuit innovation, and radio transmission and reception were improved significantly (see Figure 5).

The invention of the transistor at Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1947 marked the beginning of a new era in electronics. With the inventions of integration in 1958, and the planar technology in 1959, the basic ingredients were in place for the industrialization of electronics. The inventions were crowned by the commercial introduction of the integrated circuit (IC) in 1961. During this very innovative period, a high number of discoveries and inventions were made, and it is beyond the scope of this paper to mention all of them. However, the 3 above inventions are the key to the industrialization of electronics.

The second age of electronics began with the introduction of the microprocessor in November, 1971. Together with the introduction of the semiconductor memory in 1970, these events were the start of a truly astounding evolution towards higher integration densities and performance.

Since 1961, the electronics industry has experienced four decades of uninterrupted, exponential growth. In an amazingly visionary prediction in the early 1960s, Gordon Moore, then Fairchild Corporation and later cofounder of Intel, predicted, that the number of transistors that can be integrated on a single die would grow exponentially with time²⁾. Similarly, transistor count as well as clock frequency have displayed exponential growth.

In a period of less than 50 years, electronics has pervaded almost any aspect of our lives. And electronics has become an important factor in the economy of the world. One measure of the impact can be found in the gross domestic product (GDP) of the world. In 1992, the GDP of the world was approximately US$ 10 trillion, and of this total, US$ 1013 billion or 10%, was directly traceable to electronics.

Author: Flemming Stassen
(http://www.it.dtu.dk/~stassen/Edu/49260/Historie)