| The phenomenon of electrostatic discharge (ESD) has been known for a long time, but recently a growing interest has been observed in ESD in radio frequency (RF) technology and ESD issues in RF applications.
Why now?
Early telecommunications started with William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone in the development of the electric telegraph that became commercial in 1838. This technology was rapidly replaced by Samuel Morse, with the introduction of the ‘‘Morse Code,’’ first introduced in 1844, which reduced the communication into dots and dashes and listening to the receiver. By 1906, Lee De Forest introduced the first three-element vacuum tube detector, opening the future to vacuum tubes for electronic applications for radio in the future. The Wireless Era began. My personal library contains some old volumes of discarded radio engineering books. An old dusty book by Herbert J. Reich on ‘‘Theory and Applications of Electron Tubes’’ is stamped on the side ‘‘RADIATION LABORATORY BLDG. 24,’’ and superimposed is ‘‘Document Room, Research Laboratory, Mass. Inst. Technology.’’ This is adjacent to another text, the 1947 third edition of ‘‘Radio Engineering’’ by Frederick Emmons Terman. The 1947 textbook apologizes on the first pages with a note ‘‘the quality of the materials used in the manufacture of this book is governed by continued war shortage.’’ In the 1947 Terman text book, the new edition focuses on new issues such as television and the advancements called ‘‘radar.’’ Adjacent to that text is my copy of ‘‘Basic Electron Tubes’’ by Donovan Geppert of General Electric Company. By 1951, the McGraw-Hill launched the ‘‘Electrical and Electronic Engineering Series’’ with texts such as Fundamentals of Vacuum Tubes by Eastman, Vacuum Tubes by Spangenberg, Transmission Lines and Networks by Johnson, Antennas by Kraus, and many more texts in the growing electrical engineering discipline.
In the late 1970’s, I was a graduate student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), in the Research Lab of Electronics (RLE). Our faculty were from the ‘‘Rad Lab Era’’ and so was the microwave equipment. The old ‘‘Rad Lab’’ building was still in place, and the building was filled with old machinists and the last of the glass lathe experts from the vacuum tube days. Old microwave and radio books were being discarded to make space for new texts in the MIT libraries. The Microwave Era was dying, and the faculty who brought it into existence were retiring out. The interest in ‘‘radio frequency’’ (RF) and microwave was limited and was not growing. |
