COVER FEATURE: NOW MICROWAVES IN EUROPE: HISTORICAL MILESTONES AND INDUSTRY UPDATE, PART I Tracing from Maxwell, through World War II to the communications boom and beyond, this report provides an insight into Europe’s historical role and the part it continues to play in the development of the global microwave industry. hen Ted Saad and Bill Bazzy took year with a potted history of microwaves in Eu- their “Flight into the European rope in addition to considering present and fu- Market” in 1963, they presented a ture trends. To do so Microwave Journal has W enlisted the expertise and knowledge of Prof. snapshot of the European microwave market at an interesting point in time. At the begin- Roberto Sorrentino, the president of the Euro- ning of the ‘Swinging 60s’ there was a hopeful pean Microwave Association, aided by EuMA perception that the swing would be towards regional members from selected European prosperity driven by innovation. The continent countries. They chart historical, industrial, aca- was well on its way to economic recovery after demic, research and political changes, and World War II, fuelled by technological and proffer an insight into future trends. commercial development, and eager to satisfy Space constraints mean that this report the appetite of a developing consumer society. cannot include every significant, industry Yet, in hindsight, it was also a time that was ig- defining event. Please visit our blog to add norant of the imminent communications events you think should have been included boom (and bust) that has since impacted sig- (microwavejournal.blogspot.com). nificantly on society and the microwave indus- try that serves it. THE GEOGRAPHICAL LANDSCAPE Nearly 50 years on, do Saad’s and Bazzy’s Microwaves in Europe Overview observations still ring true? Do European companies concentrate on manufacturing Roberto Sorrentino and André Vander Vorst rather than research and development? Is the EuMA largest percentage of microwave work in the Electromagnetic science was born in Europe, th defence sector? And whatever did happen to essentially in the 19 century. We all know the that Swedish company, L.M. Ericsson? names and contributions of Ampère, Coulomb, This article aims to answer some of those questions, while maintaining the historical RICHARD MUMFORD theme of Microwave Journal’s 50th anniversary Microwave Journal European Editor 28 MICROWAVE JOURNAL I SEPTEMBER 2008 COVER FEATURE: NOW Faraday, Gauss, Lenz, Oersted, Ohm As a result, no one realized the sig- from these two concepts: action at a and others. They were clever enough to nificance of Maxwell’s equations until distance and non-instantaneous char- make accurate measurements at a time over 20 years after Maxwell’s 1865 acter of the effect. of limited funds and of expensive publication and almost a decade after Applications were there and equipment, and for extracting experi- his death. This is when Hertz inde- around 1894, Marconi invented ‘ra- mental laws out of their measurements. pendently derived them in their mod- dio’, the practical way to transmit in- Then came Maxwell who spent his ern form and went on to experimen- formation trough air at a distance. In professional life working as a profes- tally confirming that light is indeed 1899, his signals went beyond the sor in Aberdeen, London, and Cam- an electromagnetic wave. Channel; in 1901, beyond the At- bridge, UK, with his two contribu- The abstract concept of using what lantic Ocean. To do so, antennas had tions: One which said that all these came to be known as ‘fields’, with ab- to be developed: propagation and ra- former experimental laws needed to solutely no connection to Newton diation are intimately entwined. Si- be taken into account, not indepen- and f = ma, revolutionized physics. multaneously there were proposals dently but as a system of equations; Maxwell was in fact the inspiration for having electromagnetic wave the other by introducing a ‘missing for Einstein and his (field) theories of propagation along structures of var- term’: the displacement current. relativity. Freeing physics from the ied form, like two-wire lines, coaxial Maxwell’s equations did not be- confining womb of Newtonian me- cables and metallic guides. come famous rapidly. As well as being chanics led directly to all the major The 20th century had not yet be- modest, Maxwell did not have formal developments of 20th century physics. gun when Lodge invented radiation use of div and curl, so he had 20 It was actually this much more signif- from waveguides, Rayleigh published equations in 20 variables with what icant but lesser realized accomplish- solutions of Maxwell’s equations for we today call magnetic vector poten- ment that was Maxwell’s most signifi- fields in rectangular and circular tial as primary. Maxwell’s equations cant legacy. waveguides, Bose developed a semi- were simply too complicated. Also, Hertz confirmed experimentally conducting detector at 60 GHz, and when he published the equations in that light is an electromagnetic wave the door opened on Hertzian links their complete form (1865), he made and that these waves propagate. He with paraboloidal aerials. no attempt to connect them back to showed that high frequency oscilla- From a theoretical point of view, the lord and ruler of physics at that tions could produce an effect at a dis- the first ten years of the 20th century time, Isaac Newton; there was no tance, and that this action requires saw Einstein publishing his famous mechanical model. time. The word ‘propagation’ comes four papers. Later, it was shown that Visit http://mwj.hotims.com/16345-143 COVER FEATURE: NOW applying a relativistic transformation All this generated a very signifi- tering matrix (S-matrix) of most com- to Coulomb’s law while postulating cant microwave legacy, and explains mon use for tens of years, developed the speed of light constant with re- why comprehensive advances in mi- independently in Europe and in the spect to the observer, a postulate crowaves have been achieved in Eu- US around 1945. A third is the gyra- proven later by experiment, yields rope in the 20th century, in line with tor, also developed at the end of the relativistic expressions for electro- the 19th century developments. 1940s. Also, a significant European- magnetic force, from which Maxwell’s One example concerns the con- coordinated effort in the field of mi- equations can then be deduced: In cepts of bi-isotropy, bi-anisotropy, crowave propagation, in particular significantly less than 100 years, the non-reciprocity and chirality, intro- tropospheric propagation. Even the 19th century electric and magnetic ex- duced by Arago and Pasteur in the term ‘microwaves’, in its current perimental laws were proved to be 19th century, and further investigated meaning, was first introduced in an included in the theory of relativity. in 1920 and later. Another is the scat- international scientific journal (IRE Proceedings) in 1932 by the Italian physicist N. Carrara. There is no definitive date but mi- crowave activities in a number of Eu- ropean countries may be traced back to the radar interests of the 1930s, al- though the first patent had been tak- en in Germany before 1910. Several companies worked on the first mag- netrons. A quite significant achieve- ment was the design and installation of a chain of radar stations (Chain Home) along the East and South coast of England in 1938, in time for the outbreak of war. Microwave development during World War II was outstanding. Since then, the microwave infrastructure Control Freaks has grown extensively, encompassing university, industry, and government At State of the Art, we like control... ministries, in support of comprehen- sive research, development, and pro- the superior design, manufacturing and duction of microwave practices to delivery of every resistor we make. meet wide-ranging applications cov- ering all microwave fields from radio Technology, quality and reliability to terahertz frequencies. In the early are not an option; they’re a given. decades, this was motivated by mili- And our policy of made in the USA tary needs; more recently, civil broad- will never change. cast and communication interests have become increasingly dominant. Sure we’re control freaks, but you One of the most exciting fields of wouldn’t want it any other way. advancing technology over the last 50 years has been in microwave solid- state devices with associated integrat- ed circuits. Such a very large quanti- tative growth, as well as continuous advances in research, industrial de- We are mission-critical resistor specialists velopment, and education, has been driven by the dramatic growth of ap- plications, particularly of telecommu- RESISTIVE PRODUCTS nications systems. By its very nature Europe is a con- glomeration of individual and dis- parate countries with its own estab- 2470 Fox Hill Road, State College, PA 16803-1797 Phone: 800-458-3401 or 814-355-8004 • Fax: 814-355-2714 lished industries and centres of acad- E-mail: [email protected] • Source code: 56235 emic and commercial research. In QUALIFICATIONS the past, many of these research es- ISO9001 & AS9100 • MIL-PRF-55342 • MIL-PRF-32159 • MIL-PRF-914 tablishments would have worked in- dependently. However, that has grad- ually changed with the expanded Eu- 32 Visit http://mwj.hotims.com/16345-177 MICROWAVE JOURNAL I SEPTEMBER 2008 COVER FEATURE: NOW ropean Union putting greater empha- of Excellence (NoE) Programmes that reviews were coordinated by EuMA sis on cooperation and collaboration encourage pan-European collaboration colleagues; most of them had previ- to pool resources, harness technologi- and the input of academia, research in- ously contributed to a paper1 pre- cal expertise, and forge partnerships stitutes and industry. senting an overview of microwave ac- to create real and productive initia- That is a very succinct overview of tivities and infrastructures in Europe, tives.