1-theme: telecomunication

Semiconductor era - The modern period of telecommunication history from 1950 onwards is referred to as the semiconductor era, due to the wide adoption of semiconductor devices in telecommunication technology. The development of transistor technology and the semiconductor industry enabled significant advances in telecommunication technology, and led to a transition away from state-owned narrowband circuit-switched networks to private broadband packet-switched networks. Metal–oxide–semiconductor (MOS) technologies such as large-scale integration (LSI) and RF CMOS (radio-frequency complementary MOS), along with information theory (such as data compression), led to a transition from analog to digital signal processing, with the introduction of digital telecommunications (such as digital telephony and digital media) and wireless communications (such as cellular networks and mobile telephony), leading to rapid growth of the telecommunications industry towards the end of the 20th century.

Transistors - The development of transistor technology has been fundamental to modern electronic telecommunication. The first transistor, a point-contact transistor, was invented by John Bardeen and Walter Houser Brattain at Bell Labs in 1947. The MOSFET (metal–oxide–silicon field-effect transistor), also known as the MOS transistor, was later invented by Mohamed M. Atalla and Dawon Kahng at Bell Labs in 1959. The MOSFET is the building block or "workhorse" of the information revolution and the information age, and the most widely manufactured device in history. MOS technology, including MOS integrated circuits and power MOSFETs, drives the communications infrastructure of modern telecommunication. Along with computers, other essential elements of modern telecommunication that are built from MOSFETs include mobile devices, transceivers, base station modules, routers, RF power amplifiers, microprocessors, memory chips, and telecommunication circuits.

According Edholm's law, the bandwidth of telecommunication networks has been doubling every 18 months. Advances in MOS technology, including MOSFET scaling (increasing transistor counts at an exponential pace, as predicted by Moore's law), has been the most important contributing factor in the rapid rise of bandwidth in telecommunications networks.