Under the headline: ‘Britain’s FIRST Electronics Newspaper’, Electronics Weekly announced its arrival to the world 50 years ago.
“This newspaper makes journalistic history,” starts the announcement on the front page of the first edition of Electronics Weekly , published on 7 September 1960.
It was the first newspaper in the UK to be devoted specifically to electronics, which was described as “Britain’s fastest growing industry”.
Looking back over the past 50 years will convince you of one thing; the UK has an electronics and microelectronics heritage that it can be proud of.
In 1967 a UK company installed a MOS semiconductor process a full year before Intel was founded expressly to develop MOS.
By 1968 government money of $8m for chip research was about one- third as much as the American government was spending.
Plessey was a world leader in ECL (emitter-coupled logic). Ferranti invented semi-custom chips by making the world’s first gate array – the bipolar ULA (uncommitted logic array).
In 1976, just four years after Intel’s Ted Hoff made the first microprocessor, the 4004, UK-based Ferranti launched its first 16-bit microprocessor. “The single chip device is to have a repertoire of 64 instructions, and the clock rate will be 10MHz, giving instruction times of between 300ns and 2.1 microseconds.”
Yet poor business foresight and a lack of investment from the late 1970s onward, when the global semiconductor industry came into being, meant the UK failed to build on its semiconductor foundations.
UK’s first fab closes
There have been many wafer fab closures in the UK over the years with NEC, Siemens, Atmel and DEC, to name but a few, but which was the very first fab closure?
That could be the closure of Transitron’s fab at Maidenhead which, according to Electronics Weekly in November 1972, was to be closed with all the company’s diffusion operations switched to its plants in Mexico and the US.
Let’s not forget that in 1978 a Bristol-based start-up called Inmos designed the world’s first parallel processing device, the transputer. The world was not ready for parallelism in 1978.
This is not ancient history. Even as late as 1994, GEC had plans to invest £100m in its chip business, GEC-Plessey Semiconductors (GPS) to set up the then-advanced 0.5µm CMOS process at its Roborough wafer fabrication facility in Plymouth.
Joining the space race
The UK’s love affair with space technology started 50 years ago. The first government-funded space research project started in 1960.
A story in Electronics Weekly said: “A team of scientists in the research laboratories of Elliott Automation have been working for some time in conjunction with the Royal Aeronautical Establishment, Farnborough, on ‘certain vital aspects’ of a British space project.”
Nobel Prize winner
In 1972 Electronics Weekly reported the presentation of the MacRobert Award, described as the “Nobel Prize of engineering” to Godfrey Hounsfield of EMI for inventing the X-ray scanner.
“It enables 100 times more information to be extracted from the X-ray photons than with conventional methods and so is able to detect minute variations in the density of the brain which it has been difficult, if not impossible to detect before, such as early growth of tumours or internal bleeding,” said the report.
Seven years later, Hounsfield won the actual Nobel Prize, taking the 1979 Nobel Prize for Medicine for developing computer-assisted tomography.
In telecommunications, the first digital telephone exchange, optical fibre links and the first commercial radio telephone were pioneered in the UK.
The first telephone call made over an optical fibre system was carried on a system developed by researchers at British Telecommunications (then a branch of the Post Office) and Essex-based STC in 1978.
The genesis of Vodafone
“Looking around Racal’s modern factory at Bracknell, it seems hardly possible that a mere 10 years ago this virile organisation, now with a turnover of some £2m a year, did not exist,” continues the report.
So starts a story in Electronics Weekly’s edition of April 26th 1961 describing a visit to Racal Engineering – the company which later spawned Racal Telecom, which became Vodafone.
There is a real sense of hope in the technological future in these pages of the magazine. There is a belief that anything is possible and the UK had the engineers and technology companies to achieve it.
Mobile comms world leaders
This sense of aspiration can be clearly seen in a front page story from June 1969.
“With a spirit of aggression often lacking in British industry, Pye Telecommunications are striding confidently ahead towards their goal of world leadership in the mobile communications field,” read the story.
Its aim was “to knock Motorola off the number one pedestal”.
Cambridge-based Pye, one of the UK’s oldest radio brands, was eventually bought by Philips in 1976.
First business computers
In October 1947, the directors of J Lyons & Company – which owned the Joe Lyons Corner Houses, a chain of UK tea-shops – decided to replace the Burroughs mechanical adding machines it used with an electronic computer, and set out to make one.
The result, in 1961, was the world’s first commercial computer the LEO – standing for Lyons Electronic Office.
The computer was built by John Pinkerton, who based it on the early EDSAC computer at Cambridge University.
In 1975, Electronics Weekly’s front page said “Sinclair about to launch two-inch TV”. The mini-TV was rumoured to be in development at Clive Sinclair’s company for several years.
This week at the Future World Symposium in London, Tony King-Smith, vice-president of marketing at Imagination Technologies, will describe his belief that a very high proportion of the major semiconductor building blocks are still being developed in UK companies.
“If we look at the industry dynamics it becomes clear that the future is in flexible applications platforms, and the UK leads not only in the electronics but in many of the key apps that are driving consumer uptake of these new products, from phones to tablets and from photo frames to printers,” says King-Smith.
The history of the past 50 years describes an industry that thrives on innovative design and individuality.
The most pressing question now is how that drive to innovate and the engineering skills that underpin it will be nurtured, developed and capitalised on.
“We have a tremendous collection of highly innovative small start-ups in silicon, software and systems engineering that, if correctly nurtured, could make a significant contribution to the UK’s future,” says King-Smith.
“Right now that nurturing is not there from the government. Instead it’s left to private firms.”
The happy reality is that there is as much potential today as there was 50 years ago for UK-based electronics companies to become world leaders as ARM and Imaginations Technologies have done in the area of semiconductor IP.
“Many of the electronics technologies at the very heart of social, economic and political change are being developed here in the UK.” says King-Smith. “But, so much more could be achieved if the world-class UK technology industries are properly recognised and supported for their contribution to the UK and world economies.”