Career
His first appointment was as a Research Engineer with GEC in London, there in 1956 he secured a patent for an improved transistor oscillator design. Hooper then returned to the University of Melbourne where he spent 10 years in the Electrical Engineering Department, first as a Lecturer and later as a Senior Lecturer. In 1967, he joined Plessey Pacific and subsequently was promoted to Chief Engineer of the Plessey Company in the UK, in charge of research and development. [1]
Hooper's research and teaching experience was mainly in the area of transistor theory and characterization, pulse-forming circuits, wide band amplifiers, active filters and integrated circuit design. [4] In 1968, Edward Moore Cherry and Daryl Hooper published their book on circuit design entitled Amplifying Devices and Low-Pass Amplifier Design. The book ran to 1036 pages and was regarded as the premier book on the design of transistor amplifiers. [1]
In 1975, Hooper was appointed to the Tad Szental Chair in Communication Engineering at La Trobe University with the charge to establish the first engineering department at La Trobe. His Department of Communication Engineering took in its first students in 1976. Hooper left La Trobe in 1980 to take up the position of Head of one of the Laboratories of the GEC Research Hirst Centre in Wembley, UK under the Director Derek Roberts. Subsequently, in 1983 he became Director of HRC. [1]
Electronics is a scientific and engineering discipline that studies and applies the principles of physics to design, create, and operate devices that manipulate electrons and other electrically charged particles. Electronics is a subfield of electrical engineering, but it differs from it in that it focuses on using active devices such as transistors, diodes, and integrated circuits to control and amplify the flow of electric current and to convert it from one form to another, such as from alternating current (AC) to direct current (DC) or from analog signals to digital signals. Electronics also encompasses the fields of microelectronics, nanoelectronics, optoelectronics, and quantum electronics, which deal with the fabrication and application of electronic devices at microscopic, nanoscopic, optical, and quantum scales.
An electronic oscillator is an electronic circuit that produces a periodic, oscillating or alternating current (AC) signal, usually a sine wave, square wave or a triangle wave, powered by a direct current (DC) source. Oscillators are found in many electronic devices, such as radio receivers, television sets, radio and television broadcast transmitters, computers, computer peripherals, cellphones, radar, and many other devices.
Harold Stephen Black was an American electrical engineer, who revolutionized the field of applied electronics by inventing the negative feedback amplifier in 1927. To some, his invention is considered the most important breakthrough of the twentieth century in the field of electronics, since it has a wide area of application. This is because all electronic devices are inherently nonlinear, but they can be made substantially linear with the application of negative feedback. Negative feedback works by sacrificing gain for higher linearity. By sacrificing gain, it also has an additional effect of increasing the bandwidth of the amplifier. However, a negative feedback amplifier can be unstable such that it may oscillate. Once the stability problem is solved, the negative feedback amplifier is extremely useful in the field of electronics. Black published a famous paper, Stabilized feedback amplifiers, in 1934.
In electronics a relaxation oscillator is a nonlinear electronic oscillator circuit that produces a nonsinusoidal repetitive output signal, such as a triangle wave or square wave. The circuit consists of a feedback loop containing a switching device such as a transistor, comparator, relay, op amp, or a negative resistance device like a tunnel diode, that repetitively charges a capacitor or inductor through a resistance until it reaches a threshold level, then discharges it again. The period of the oscillator depends on the time constant of the capacitor or inductor circuit. The active device switches abruptly between charging and discharging modes, and thus produces a discontinuously changing repetitive waveform. This contrasts with the other type of electronic oscillator, the harmonic or linear oscillator, which uses an amplifier with feedback to excite resonant oscillations in a resonator, producing a sine wave.
In electronics, negative resistance (NR) is a property of some electrical circuits and devices in which an increase in voltage across the device's terminals results in a decrease in electric current through it.
A regenerative circuit is an amplifier circuit that employs positive feedback. Some of the output of the amplifying device is applied back to its input to add to the input signal, increasing the amplification. One example is the Schmitt trigger, but the most common use of the term is in RF amplifiers, and especially regenerative receivers, to greatly increase the gain of a single amplifier stage.
The Plessey Company plc was a British electronics, defence and telecommunications company. It originated in 1917, growing and diversifying into electronics. It expanded after World War II by acquisition of companies and formed overseas companies.
The Clapp oscillator or Gouriet oscillator is an LC electronic oscillator that uses a particular combination of an inductor and three capacitors to set the oscillator's frequency. LC oscillators use a transistor and a positive feedback network. The oscillator has good frequency stability.
A Wien bridge oscillator is a type of electronic oscillator that generates sine waves. It can generate a large range of frequencies. The oscillator is based on a bridge circuit originally developed by Max Wien in 1891 for the measurement of impedances. The bridge comprises four resistors and two capacitors. The oscillator can also be viewed as a positive gain amplifier combined with a bandpass filter that provides positive feedback. Automatic gain control, intentional non-linearity and incidental non-linearity limit the output amplitude in various implementations of the oscillator.
Radio-frequency (RF) engineering is a subset of electrical engineering involving the application of transmission line, waveguide, antenna and electromagnetic field principles to the design and application of devices that produce or use signals within the radio band, the frequency range of about 20 kHz up to 300 GHz.
Sir Christopher Maxwell Snowden, is a British electronic engineer and academic. He was the former Vice-Chancellor of Surrey University (2005–2015), and of the University of Southampton (2015–2019). He was president of Universities UK for a two-year term until 31 July 2015. He is currently the chairman of the ERA Foundation.
The ZN414 is a low cost, single-chip AM radio integrated circuit. Launched in 1972, the part was designed and supplied by Ferranti, but was second sourced from GEC-Plessey. The ZN414 was popular amongst hobbyists, as a fully working AM radio could be made with just a few external components, a crystal earpiece and a 1.5 V cell.
This article details the history of electronics engineering. Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary (1972) defines electronics as "The science and technology of the conduction of electricity in a vacuum, a gas, or a semiconductor, and devices based thereon".
Sean Scanlan MRIA, IEEE Life Fellow was an Irish circuit theorist and electronic engineering professor.
James Robert Biard was an American electrical engineer and inventor who held 73 U.S. patents. Some of his more significant patents include the first infrared light-emitting diode (LED), the optical isolator, Schottky clamped logic circuits, silicon Metal Oxide Semiconductor Read Only Memory, a low bulk leakage current avalanche photodetector, and fiber-optic data links. In 1980, Biard became a member of the staff of Texas A&M University as an Adjunct Professor of Electrical Engineering. In 1991, he was elected as a member into the National Academy of Engineering for contributions to semiconductor light-emitting diodes and lasers, Schotky-clamped logic, and read-only memories.
Suhash Chandra Dutta Roy is an Indian electrical engineer and a former professor and head of the department of electrical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. He is known for his studies on analog and digital signal processing and is an elected fellow of all the three major Indian science academies viz. Indian Academy of Sciences, Indian National Science Academy, National Academy of Sciences, India as well as the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Institution of Electronics and Telecommunication Engineers, Systems Society of India and Acoustical Society of India, The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the apex agency of the Government of India for scientific research, awarded him the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, one of the highest Indian science awards for his contributions to Engineering Sciences in 1981.
Roger John Malik is a physicist, engineer and inventor.
RF CMOS is a metal–oxide–semiconductor (MOS) integrated circuit (IC) technology that integrates radio-frequency (RF), analog and digital electronics on a mixed-signal CMOS RF circuit chip. It is widely used in modern wireless telecommunications, such as cellular networks, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, GPS receivers, broadcasting, vehicular communication systems, and the radio transceivers in all modern mobile phones and wireless networking devices. RF CMOS technology was pioneered by Pakistani engineer Asad Ali Abidi at UCLA during the late 1980s to early 1990s, and helped bring about the wireless revolution with the introduction of digital signal processing in wireless communications. The development and design of RF CMOS devices was enabled by van der Ziel's FET RF noise model, which was published in the early 1960s and remained largely forgotten until the 1990s.
Prof. Siddheshwari Prasad Chakravarti was an Indian engineer, researcher, and educator. He was known as the father of electronics and telecommunications engineering in India.
G. B. B. "Barrie" Chaplin was a British engineer and inventor, and professor emeritus at the University of Essex where he established the Department of Electrical Engineering Science in 1966. He was selected by the IET as one of its 95 inspiring engineers and technologists of the past, present, and future and he was included in an exhibition at Savoy Place.
