An Enabling Technology
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I am very honored indeed to have received the Von Hippel Award from the Materials Research Society, and to have joined the distinguished list of names of previous recipients of the award, in whose company I never expected to find myself. I have accepted this honor as recognition not so much of what I might have contributed myself, but primarily of the contributions which my close colleagues and students have made over the years. On an occasion like this it is perhaps appropriate to look back to get a view of what has been achieved in materials science, and in the fields in which I am interested in particular, over the last 35 years or so, to assess the changes in the nature of the science and its objectives, and to look forward to the future. In the 40s, 50s, and 60s we lived through a period in which the development of solid state physics led to a revolution in understanding of crystalline solids. In the field of mechanical properties of solids dislocation theory developed rapidly and in the same period electron microscopy and microanalytical techniques became available, which allowed materials to be characterized in unprecedented detail and on a fine scale, and which helped, inter alia, to establish dislocation theory on a firm basis. The general advances in electron theory of solids led to the revolution in semiconductor device technology, while the development of new polymers and plastics has led to impressive growth and diversity in application of these materials. The science of composite materials has been largely worked out and composites are likely to become of increasing importance in the future. To the materials scientist interested in fundamental mechanisms it was a very exciting era. In many universities materials science became a new discipline, with the basic philosophy that the properties of metals, alloys, ceramics, polymers, etc., could all be understood in terms of the same fundamental principles, structural units and forces—electrons, atoms, crystals, defects, polycrystals, interatomic forces, thermodynamics, etc.—and that in this way macroscopic properties could be synthesized in terms of microscopic parameters. Over the last ten years or so, there has been a growing realization that in the universities in the U.K. the interface between materials science and engineering has been neglected: the motivation for much of the advances in materials science and physical metallurgy had been to achieve a better understanding of basic mechanisms controlling microstructure-property relationships and work aimed at solving engineering problems, particularly relating to manufacturing technology, had not been emphasized sufficiently. In the case of microelectronics research this
PETER HIRSCH problem has not arisen; the development of new devices requires sophisticated processing and fabrication methods and monitoring by advanced, often electron optical techniques, areas in which the engineering interface is at the frontier of knowledge. Consequently in this area the universities and industry collaborate closel
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