Report from the IEEE

Technical reports

Report from the IEEE

An invited lecture was delivered by John Roulston, the Director of Technology of BAE SYSTEMS Avionics, and Industrial Professor at Edinburgh University,Scotland UK, at the close of the annual general meeting of the United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland IEEE at Savoy Place, London (March 2002).

Professor Roulston’s lecture was lavishly illustrated and raised a very high level of discussion. In particular, the role of science education and the sophistication of the mathematical foundation to the technology base was questioned. There appear to be an agreement amongst those attending and the invited speaker, that national standards needed urgent overhaul.

The lecture started with an illustration of the status of electrical technology at the turn of the last century. In parallel with this, Professor Roulston sketched the science base on which classical digital computation and modern radio communications are founded.

A report by Tom Hammons (IEEE ULRI Section – Past Chair) summarised the address:

• This spanned the age from Liebnitz to Turing and from Faraday to Lee de Forest. The overwhelming impression he gave was the solidity of the theoretical base and the profound interaction of mathematics and its application. The impetus of the war years and the television age that followed spawned solid-state electronics and the physical implementation of computers, as we know them.

It continued by pointing out that in the war years the search for efficient decryption of coded messages drove the development of the classical computer. We have now, it said, evolved to an understanding of the mathematics of encryption that pivots security on the difficulty of factorisation of large integer.

In discussing this, the report said that:

• This is a problem that defeats classical machines but is nevertheless pertinent today with communications via the Internet and the interest of governments to control information flow. Fortunately, the theoretical basis of the next breakthrough has been laid in the physics of Quantum Information and already researchers have postulated the principles of a Quantum Computer that defies the limits of the classical machine. It remains to find a technological implementation and here Professor Roulston described the latest work on Fullerine structures, carbon nano-tubes and the potential for transistor action at the Quantum level through the modification of work-functions by encapsulation of dopant atoms in nano-tubes. This gave an insight into material construction at the atomic level. The conclusion drawn was that the technology supporting Quantum Computing is roughly at the stage of classical computing at the turn of the last century, but that the rate of progress is much faster such that we might expect to see practical systems within our lifetime.