Electronic engineering

Electronic engineering (also called electronics and communications engineering) is an electrical engineering discipline which utilizes nonlinear and active electrical components (such as semiconductor devices, especially transistors, diodes and integrated circuits) to design electronic circuits, devices, VLSI devices and their systems. The discipline typically also designs passive electrical components, usually based on printed circuit boards. Electronic engineering (also called electronics and communications engineering) is an electrical engineering discipline which utilizes nonlinear and active electrical components (such as semiconductor devices, especially transistors, diodes and integrated circuits) to design electronic circuits, devices, VLSI devices and their systems. The discipline typically also designs passive electrical components, usually based on printed circuit boards. Electronics is a subfield within the wider electrical engineering academic subject but denotes a broad engineering field that covers subfields such as analog electronics, digital electronics, consumer electronics, embedded systems and power electronics. Electronics engineering deals with implementation of applications, principles and algorithms developed within many related fields, for example solid-state physics, radio engineering, telecommunications, control systems, signal processing, systems engineering, computer engineering, instrumentation engineering, electric power control, robotics, and many others. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is one of the most important and influential organizations for electronics engineers based in the US. On an international level, the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) prepares standards for electronic engineering, developed through consensus and thanks to the work of 20,000 experts from 172 countries worldwide. Electronics is a subfield within the wider electrical engineering academic subject. An academic degree with a major in electronics engineering can be acquired from some universities, while other universities use electrical engineering as the subject. The term electrical engineer is still used in the academic world to include electronic engineers. However, some people consider the term 'electrical engineer' should be reserved for those having specialized in power and heavy current or high voltage engineering, while others consider that power is just one subset of electrical engineering, as well as 'electrical distribution engineering'. The term 'power engineering' is used as a descriptor in that industry. Again, in recent years there has been a growth of new separate-entry degree courses such as 'systems engineering' and 'communication systems engineering', often followed by academic departments of similar name, which are typically not considered as subfields of electronics engineering but of electrical engineering. Electronic engineering as a profession sprang from technological improvements in the telegraph industry in the late 19th century and the radio and the telephone industries in the early 20th century. People were attracted to radio by the technical fascination it inspired, first in receiving and then in transmitting. Many who went into broadcasting in the 1920s were only 'amateurs' in the period before World War I. To a large extent, the modern discipline of electronic engineering was born out of telephone, radio, and television equipment development and the large amount of electronic systems development during World War II of radar, sonar, communication systems, and advanced munitions and weapon systems. In the interwar years, the subject was known as radio engineering and it was only in the late 1950s that the term electronic engineering started to emerge. In the field of electronic engineering, engineers design and test circuits that use the electromagnetic properties of electrical components such as resistors, capacitors, inductors, diodes and transistors to achieve a particular functionality. The tuner circuit, which allows the user of a radio to filter out all but a single station, is just one example of such a circuit. In designing an integrated circuit, electronics engineers first construct circuit schematics that specify the electrical components and describe the interconnections between them. When completed, VLSI engineers convert the schematics into actual layouts, which map the layers of various conductor and semiconductor materials needed to construct the circuit. The conversion from schematics to layouts can be done by software (see electronic design automation) but very often requires human fine-tuning to decrease space and power consumption. Once the layout is complete, it can be sent to a fabrication plant for manufacturing. For systems of intermediate complexity, engineers may use VHDL modeling for programmable logic devices and FPGAs.