Customer handsets are a prominent example of semiconductors being heavily utilized in telecommunications. Modern smartphones, particularly, are built around intricate semiconductor technology, incorporating countless transistors to power their advanced features. This marks a significant evolution from traditional telephones, which relied on discrete components like metal and carbon parts arranged to create functional systems. In those earlier designs, making a call involved establishing a direct electrical connection between two points to form a complete circuit. While the principles of connecting devices for communication remain, cellular technology accomplishes this through far more complex systems, leveraging semiconductors to manage signal processing, data transmission, and other critical functions.
These systems often use advanced semiconductors stacked together to enable enhanced functionality. Semiconductor plates power everything from the actual onboard graphics processors to the touchscreen itself. If you watch movies or listen to the radio using your phone, you’re also using semiconductors in this way, even if these aren’t necessarily related to telecommunications.
What is The Field of Telecommunications Anyway?
Since telephones have been around since at least 1876, it can take a lot of work to define the word telecommunications. It refers to tools and technologies that facilitate communication over long distances, including methods like mass broadcasting.
Since radio receivers and televisions use transistors in their construction, these also represent a semiconductor application. When the digital transition came around, even these devices needed to include special components designed to decode compressed transmissions. They also use additional graphics processing circuits to produce high-definition pictures that look great even on the largest displays.
Engineers remain deeply involved in the field, actively developing new technologies and innovations aimed at improving and advancing the industry.
Advancements in Telecommunications Technology
Video monitoring and task automation are both driving manufacturing trends in the space. Individual drivers still need to accept autonomous vehicles entirely, but they’re quickly carving out their market segment. Logistics routing and three-dimensional mapping services work along similar lines. Although these sectors may appear unrelated, many depend on the telecommunications market in various ways. Many are linked to the publicly switched telephone network, interacting with the digital switches used by phone company central offices to route data to appropriate destinations. If you send packets online, then you can be sure they pass through numerous semiconductors on their way to their final destination.
So-called system-on-a-chip blocks allow a multitude of semiconductors to work together to emulate the functionality of some other kind of device. These are becoming popular with mobile device designers who plan to produce Internet-of-Things equipment over the next few years. Consumers who plan on deploying their camera drones or who need to shoot high-resolution videos will be among the first to take advantage of these new technologies.
Over time, these advancements may gradually find their way into consumer handsets as technology continues to evolve. By the time this integration happens, it is likely that engineers will already be focusing on developing the next significant innovation, pushing the boundaries of what is possible in the field.
Published by Zane L.
