The Role of Materials in the Electronics World of 2012 A.D.: An Update

To follow up on the previous reprinted post by Gordon Teal.

T. C. MCGILL, MEMBER, IEEE
Predictive Paper
In reviewing the predictions by G. K. Teal, I am struck most by the accuracy of his vision. The year 1962 was at the very beginning of the electronics revolution. At that time, Teal was Assistant Vice-President of Research and Engineering at Texas Instruments, Inc., Dallas, TX. Silicon integrated circuits were but a gleam in the eyes of a select few, yet Teal saw clearly that modern electronics would be based, fundamentally and pervasively, on “tailor-making materials starting at the atomic level.” In pointing specifically to the anticipated prominence of thin-film deposition techniques that could provide control over material constituents “in atomic amounts,” he correctly—and with enormous prescience—predicted the current dominance of deposition techniques such as molecular-beam epitaxy and chemical vapor deposition. Indeed, the highly controlled deposition of semiconductor layers that constitute the active part of advanced devices is one of the fundamental underpinnings of modern electronics and optoelectronics.

This is an excerpt from the published article: PROCEEDINGS OF THE IEEE, VOL. 87, NO. 5, MAY 1999


T. C. McGill (Member, IEEE) received the B.S. degree in mathematics
in 1963 and in electrical engineering in 1964 from Lamar State College
of Technology, Beaumont, TX, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical
engineering from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech),
Pasadena, in 1965 and 1969, respectively.
He is the Fletcher Jones Professor of Applied at the California Institute
of Technology. After postdoctoral study in physics at the University
of Bristol under a NATO-funded fellowship and at Princeton under an
AFNRC, he returned to Caltech’s new effort in applied physics. His
research has been aimed at the development of new devices based on
the fundamentals of solid-state physics. In over 400 refereed publications,
he has reported his work all the way from Schottky barriers to amorphous
materials, to the applications of heterojunctions and superlattices, and to
a wide class of devices. He is a member of the Defense Science Research
Council, which acts as an advisory group to the Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency, and he continues to serve as a member of the
Steering Committee. He was a member of the Congressionally mandated
Semiconductor Technology Council and is currently a member of the
Chief of Naval Operations Executive Panel. At the end of this year he
will have directed the dissertations of over 50 Ph.D. students in electrical
engineering, physics, and applied physics.

I had hoped to review Gordon's prediction with Tom in 2012, but he passed away last year at the age of 66.