Q1

Under precisely monitored conditions, a pure silicon crystal is grown.

The silicon is sawed into thin wafers with a diamond saw.
The silicon wafer is covered with a layer of insulating silicon oxide.
A covering film of protective photosensitive material is put on top of the insulating
silicon oxide.
5. UV-light is shone through a mask and onto the chip
6. On the parts of the chip that are hit by light, the protective material breaks apart.
7. The wafer is developed, rinsed and baked. The development process removes
the parts of the protective material exposed to light.
8. The wafer is treated with chemicals in a process called "etching." This removes
the unprotected insulating material, creating a pattern of non-protected silicon
wafer parts surrounded by areas protected by silicon oxide
9. The wafer is run through a process that alters the electrical properties of the
unprotected areas of the wafer. This process is called "doping."
10. Steps 3-9 are repeated to build the integrated circuit, layer by layer.
1.
2.
3.
4.

Q2
1. By a theoretical analysis of the Planck radiation formula Einstein found that the well-known
process of absorption must be accompanied by a complementary process implying that received
radiation can stimulate the atoms to emit the same kind of radiation.
2. In this process lies a potential means for amplification. However, the stimulated emission was
long regarded as a purely theoretical concept which never could be put to work or even be
observed, because the absorption would be the completely dominating process under all normal
conditions. An amplification can occur only if the stimulated emission is larger than the
absorption, and this in turn requires that there should be more atoms in a high energy state than
in a lower one. Such an unstable energy condition in matter is called an inverted population.
3. An essential moment in the invention was, therefore, to create an inverted population under such
circumstances that the stimulated emission could be used for amplification.

Charles H. Townes

Nicolay G. Basov

Aleksandr M. Prokhorov

They founded the theory of lasers and described how a laser could be built, However, the first functioning
laser was not built by them, but by Maiman in 1960.

Q3

1. An image is projected through a lens onto the capacitor array (the photoactive region),

causing each capacitor to accumulate an electric charge proportional to the light intensity at
that location.
2. A one-dimensional array,captures a single slice of the image, whereas a two-dimensional
array captures a two-dimensional picture corresponding to the scene projected onto the focal
plane of the sensor.
3. Once the array has been exposed to the image, a control circuit causes each capacitor to
transfer its contents to its neighbor (operating as a shift register). The last capacitor in the
array dumps its charge into a charge amplifier, which converts the charge into a voltage.
4. By repeating this process, the controlling circuit converts the entire contents of the array in
the semiconductor to a sequence of voltages. In a digital device, these voltages are then
sampled, digitized, and usually stored in memory;

The charge-coupled device was invented in 1969 at AT&T Bell Labs by Willard Boyle and George E.
Smith.

Q4

1. A ray of sunlight that falls into water bends when it hits the surface, because
the so-called refractive index of water is higher than the refractive index of
air. If the direction of the light beam is inverted, travelling from water into air,
it is possible that it will not enter the air at all, and instead will be reflected
back into the water.
2. light is captured inside a fiber with a higher refractive index than its
surrounding environment. A ray of light that is directed into a fiber, bounces

against the glass wall and moves forward since the refractive index of glass is
higher than the surrounding air
Fibre Optics - Charles Kuen Kao, known as Father of Fiber Optics, pioneered in the
development and use of fiber optics in telecommunications. The invention of the laser
at the beginning of the 1960s was a decisive step forward for fiber optics. The
laser was a stable source of light that emitted an intensive and highly
focused beam of light, and could be pumped into a thin optical fiber. All
information could now be coded into an extremely fast flashing light,
representing digital ones and zeros. However, how such signals could be
transmitted over longer distances was still not known after just 20 meters,
only 1 percent of the light that had entered the glass fiber remained. In
January 1966, Kao presented his conclusions. It was not imperfections in the
fiber thread that was the main problem, instead it was the glass that had to
be purified. He admitted that this would be feasible but very difficult. The
goal was to manufacture glass of a transparency that had never been
attained before.