Electronic materials- Frontiers in electronic materials : Editorial overview

Abstract

The great advances in solid state electronics can be traced to a unique combination of basic conceptual advances, the perfection of new materials, and the development of new instrumentation techniques for characterization, with an eye to new device principles. The year 1997 marked the 50th anniversary of the invention of the point contact tran- sistor at Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ. In the interven- ing SO years we have had spectacular growth in silicon tech- nology, leading to increasingly higher densities of devices which can perform more complex functions. Almost as rev- olutionary as the invention of the transistor in 1947 was the invention of the laser a decade later. Thus nearly concurrent with the electronics revolution, we have another technolog- ical revolution, the so called photonics revolution. The lasers that provide light for today’s lightwave communica-tion systems are made not from silicon but from compound semiconductors.