The Material Foundations of Modern Scientific and Technological Advances
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The Material Foundations of Modern Scientific and Technological Advances George E. Pake Group Vice President, Corporate Research Group, Xerox Corporation
The following is a transcript of Dr. Pake's address presented at the 1985 MRS Spring Meeting in San Francisco.
I,
Lt is a pleasure to be with you this evening. In my distant past as a once active researcher, it seems likely that my research interests would have impelled me to be active in the Materials Research Society, had it been flourishing in those days. But today, I find myself with responsibility for approximately 1,000 research personnel distributed among three Xerox research centers. The Webster Research Center, in Webster, New York, which is located in the Joseph C. Wilson Center for Technology, was historically the first Xerox Research Center. As you might expect, its focus has been on the xerographic imaging and marking process. With its theme of imaging and marking, many of its professionals are physicists or chemists, although there are also some engineers. And materials research is a very important component of its activities. The second research center, historically, is the Palo Alto Research Center founded in 1970. Its focus is on digital science and technology, along with an important component of materials research related to electronics and electrooptics. Our third and newest research center is in Mississauga, Ontario, just a few kilometers west of Toronto. The theme of this Xerox Research Centre of Canada is materials science and technology. The materials with which XRCC concerns itself are those important to all of our business: copiers, duplicators, and printers, including photoreceptors, dry toners, inks, and paper. I suspect that there is very little lean tell this group about the materials research foundation upon which rest the many technological advances which enable the functioning of our modern society. Perhaps the most celebrated of these advances are those relating to integrated circuits. Memory chips and microprocessors incorporating LSI or VLSI technology are becoming ubiquitous. New systems technology is now enabled by these advances. All of this goes back to the transistor and its invention as a replacement for the vacuum tube (or for the valve, if you prefer). The progression from gas envelopes to solid-state devices has proceeded apace. Gas lasers are now finding themselves candidates for being supplanted by solid-state laser diodes in many applications. There is at least the prospect that some kind of solid-state display technology will supplant
the CRT, but for most applications this transition has proved difficult and has been slow to take place. That CRT s are too bulky, too expensive to build, and too extravagant in use of power have all been evident for decades, but the ideal low-cost, rapid-response, low-power, high resolution, solid-state flat panel display remains as a challenge to materials scientists and technologists. In Xerox, we have considerable optimism that we can, for our laser xerographic printers, replac
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