Recent Developments In Electronics

The development of integrated circuits has revolutionized the fields of communications, information handling, and computing. Integrated circuits reduce the size of devices and lower manufacturing and system costs, while at the same time providing high speed and increased reliability.
Digital watches, hand-held computers, and electronic games are systems based on microprocessors.
Other developments include the digitalization of audio signals, where the frequency and amplitude of an audio signal are coded digitally by appropriate sampling techniques, that is, techniques for measuring the amplitude of the signal at very short intervals. Digitally recorded music shows a fidelity that is not possible using direct-recording methods.
Digital playback devices of this nature have already entered the home market. Digital storage could also form the basis of home video systems and may significantly alter library storage systems, because much more information can be stored on a disk for replay on a television screen than can be contained in a book.
Medical electronics has progressed from computerized axial tomography, or the use of CAT or CT scanners (see X Ray), to systems that can discriminate more and more of the organs of the human body. Devices that can view blood vessels and the respiratory system have been developed as well. Ultrahigh definition television also promises to substitute for many photographic processes, because it eliminates the need for silver.
Today's research to increase the speed and capacity of computers concentrates mainly on the improvement of integrated circuit technology and the development of even faster switching components.
Very-large-scale integrated (VLSI) circuits that contain several hundred thousand components on a single chip have been developed. Very-high-speed computers are being developed in which semiconductors may be replaced by superconducting circuits using Josephson junctions and operating at temperatures near absolute zero.

Future Developments In Computer Technology

In 1965 semiconductor pioneer Gordon Moore predicted that the number of transistors contained on a computer chip would double every year. This is now known as Moore's Law, and it has proven to be somewhat accurate. The number of transistors and the computational speed of microprocessors currently doubles approximately every 18 months. Components continue to shrink in size and are becoming faster, cheaper, and more versatile.
With their increasing power and versatility, computers simplify day-to-day life. Unfortunately, as computer use becomes more widespread, so do the opportunities for misuse. Computer hackers-people who illegally gain access to computer systems-often violate privacy and can tamper with or destroy records. Programs called viruses or worms can replicate and spread from computer to computer, erasing information or causing computer malfunctions. Other individuals have used computers to electronically embezzle funds and alter credit histories. New ethical issues also have arisen, such as how to regulate material on the Internet and the World Wide Web. Individuals, companies, and governments are working to solve these problems by developing better computer security and enacting regulatory legislation.
Computers will become more advanced and they will also become easier to use. Reliable speech recognition will make the operation of a computer easier. Virtual reality, the technology of interacting with a computer using all of the human senses, will also contribute to better human and computer interfaces. Standards for virtual-reality program languages, called Virtual Reality Modeling language (VRML), currently are being developed for the World Wide Web.

Breakthroughs occurred in the area of quantum computing in the late 1990s. Quantum computers under development use components of a chloroform molecule (a combination of chlorine and hydrogen atoms) and a variation of a medical procedure called magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to compute at a molecular level. Scientists used a branch of physics called quantum mechanics, which describes the activity of subatomic particles (particles that make up atoms), as the basis for quantum computing. Quantum computers may one day be thousands to millions of times faster than current computers, because they take advantage of the laws that govern the behavior of subatomic particles. These laws allow quantum computers to examine all possible answers to a query at one time. Future uses of quantum computers could include code breaking and large database queries.

Communications between computer users and networks will benefit from new technologies such as broadband communication systems that can carry significantly more data and carry it faster, to and from the vast interconnected databases that continue to grow in number and type.