Engineering
Engineering is the discipline, art and profession of acquiring and applying technical, scientific, and mathematical knowledge to design and implement materials, structures, machines, devices, systems, and processes that safely realize a desired objective or invention.
The American Engineers' Council for Professional Development (ECPD) has defined engineering as follows:
The creative application of scientific principles to design or develop structures, machines, apparatus, or manufacturing processes, or works utilizing them singly or in combination; or to construct or operate the same with full cognizance of their design; or to forecast their behavior under specific operating conditions; all as respects an intended function, economics of operation and safety to life and property.
One who practices engineering is called an engineer, and those licensed to do so may have more formal designations such as Professional Engineer, Chartered Engineer, Incorporated Engineer, or European Engineer. The broad discipline of engineering encompasses a range of more specialized subdisciplines, each with a more specific emphasis on certain fields of application and particular areas of technology.
Electronic Engineering
Electronics engineering, also referred to as electronic engineering is an engineering discipline which uses the scientific knowledge of the behavior and effects of electrons to develop components, devices, systems, or equipment (as in electron tubes, transistors, integrated circuits, and printed circuit boards) that uses electricity as part of its driving force. Both terms denote a broad engineering field that encompasses many sub fields including those that deal with power, instrumentation engineering, telecommunications, semiconductor circuit design, and many others.
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers is one of the most important and influential organizations for electronic engineers. Indian universities have separate departments for Electronics Engineering.
Terminology
The name electrical engineering is still used to cover electronic engineering amongst some of the older universities and graduates there are called electrical engineers. Some people believe the term 'electrical engineer' should be reserved for those having specialized in power and heavy current or high voltage engineering, while others believe that power is just one subset of electrical engineering (and indeed the term 'power engineering' is used in that industry) as well as 'electrical distribution engineering'. Again, in recent years there has been a growth of new separate-entry degree courses such as 'information engineering' and 'communication systems engineering', often followed by academic departments of similar name.History of electronic engineering
Electronic engineering as a profession sprang from technological improvements in the telegraph industry in the late 1800s and the radio and the telephone industries in the early 1900s. People were attracted to radio by the technical fascination it inspired, first in receiving and then in transmitting. Many who went into broadcasting in the 1920s were only 'amateurs' in the period before World War I.
The modern discipline of electronic engineering was to a large extent born out of telephone, radio, and television equipment development and the large amount of electronic systems development during World War II of radar, sonar, communication systems, and advanced munitions and weapon systems. In the interwar years, the subject was known as radio engineering and it was only in the late 1950s that the term electronic engineering started to emerge.
The electronic laboratories (Bell Labs in the United States for instance) created and subsidized by large corporations in the industries of radio, television, and telephone equipment began churning out a series of electronic advances. In 1948, came the transistor and in 1960, the IC to revolutionize the electronic industry. In the UK, the subject of electronic engineering became distinct from electrical engineering as a university degree subject around 1960. Before this time, students of electronics and related subjects like radio and telecommunications had to enroll in the electrical engineering department of the university as no university had departments of electronics. Electrical engineering was the nearest subject with which electronic engineering could be aligned, although the similarities in subjects covered (except mathematics and electromagnetism) lasted only for the first year of the three-year course.
