History of ECS

Electronics and Computer Science

(from The University of Southampton: An Illustrated History, published 2002)

In 1949 Eric Zepler was appointed Professor of Electronics at the University of Southampton. Between the Wars he had been chief of radio design at Telefunken in Germany, before escaping to Britain in 1935 and joining Marconi at Chelmsford. Zepler was interned as an enemy alien in 1939, released and appointed lecturer in physics at Southampton in 1941, but then seconded to the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge, returning to Southampton to be made Head of the new Department of Electronics, Telecommunications and Radio Engineering in 1946.

In the first few years after Southampton gained University status, research in electronics was concerned mainly with paramagnetic and electron spin resonance spectroscopies. It is worth remembering that, at this time, the modern world of electronics had barely begun: the transistor, ancestor of today’s microelectronic circuits, was not invented until 1948, and the first demonstration of a laser took place only in 1960 – coincidentally, the same year as the Department shortened its name to just Electronics.

Alec Gambling joined the Department in late 1957 and initially carried out research on microwaves, but soon after developed an interest in lasers as an optical source for communications. Research was then aimed at overcoming two basic disadvantages of lasers: they were crude and they were short-lived. To turn them into coherent, stable, optical sources took many years. Even so, the problem remained of how to transmit modulated laser light over very long distances. Gambling took the first, revolutionary step in 1964 when he suggested that glass fibres might be the least unlikely way of doing so. This prediction proved to be spectacularly realised.

In 1962, research in the Department took another step towards its present eminence, when a new research group was formed by Ken Nichols and Greville Bloodworth to study the philosophy, design and construction of microcircuits. This activity grew rapidly and soon had an experimental electron beam welding machine for making microcircuits and was looking at the properties and applications of thin films and integrated circuits.

Zepler retired in the following year and was succeeded by Geoffrey Sims, who remained Professor and Head of Department for the next 11 years before leaving to become Vice-Chancellor of Sheffield University. Under his leadership, the Department's academic staff increased fourfold from 7 to 28 and research groups were created in pattern recognition, medical electronics and telecommunications.

By the mid-1970s, through the work of Nichols and Henri Kemhadjian, progress in computer-aided design of microelectronic circuits had been such that Gambling (then the Dean) could report that 'New circuits can now be conceived, designed and made in the Department, all in the space of a few weeks - something which cannot be done in any other university laboratory and in few industrial ones.' In 1977-8, the Department received a special SRC grant of £200,000 to extend these facilities so that devices and circuits could be made for other universities. There was more to come. In 1980, the Department received a major SRC grant for the microelectronics fabrication facility and two UGC grants for microprocessor applications engineering, one of which was specifically for the establishment of a Chair in the subject, to which John Brignell was appointed. Support for the fabrication facility continued over the years and when the Mountbatten Building was completed in 1991 it included a £5 million world-class facility for the fabrication of silicon microcircuits and optical fibres. By 1997, this had become the EPSRC National Silicon Fabrication Facility.

While microelectronics and optical fibres continued to be major research activities, during the 1970s the Department also produced results in a rather different area. The Man-Machine Systems Research Group developed electronic aids for hearing-impaired people, which included both a transcription system and television subtitling system. The latter was developed in conjunction with the Independent Broadcasting Authority. By the early 1980s, both systems had been licensed commercially.

In 1983, Ray Steele joined the Department from Bell Laboratories as Professor of Communications to replace the late John Betts, and introduced an extensive research programme for improved worldwide communication based on cellular radio. This was supported by both SERC and British Telecommunications. One of the group's other developments was the DART system, a self-switching radio telephone which provided real possibilities for building telephone networks in rural areas where there was no infrastructure.

The Department's most significant work in electronics probably remains that optical fibre communications. During the 1970s scientists and engineers throughout the world attempted to produce fibres that would carry light signals greater distances. At first, purifying the glass was thought to be the solution. Numerous innovations were made both at Southampton and elsewhere but, even by the early 1980s, signals needed to be reinforced with expensive electronic amplifiers every 50-100 kilometres. So far the fibres had been considered as purely inert carriers of the light. Now Southampton made the most important discovery of all by inventing amplifiers 'with cores doped the rare earth element, erbium.

'For years we had been trying to purify glass,' Professor David Payne explained. 'Now we put the dirt back into it.' During the next few years Payne and Dr Richard Laming turned this discovery into a practical device which would transform the world's communications systems: an amplifier consisting of a short length of doped fibre which could easily be inserted into existing fibre cables. Optical fibre cables were now set to replace virtually all other communication cables. The sort of economies which they made possible was shown in 1997 by a transatlantic fibre cable which provided 600,000 circuits, each circuit costing US$500. The previous transatlantic cable, laid ten years earlier, had a capacity of only 8,000 circuits, each costing US$30,000.

In 1989 the inter-Departmental Optoelectronics Research Centre was established under the Directorship of Alec Gambling. This was the first interdisciplinary Research Centre to be established at the University, with an initial six-year funding of £13m. (later supplemented with a further £5m.) from the EPSRC. It was organised into three divisions - Optical technology, Optical physics and Optical systems - and had a total staff of 100, many of them transferred from the Departments of Electronics and Physics.

In 1995, David Payne, who succeeded Gambling as the Centre's Director, pointed out that ‘optoelectronics is poised to make a major impact in non- telecommunication areas, such as aerospace, oil and gas, and environmental monitoring.' An example was a trial of fibre sensors in California to increase yield of oil wells. Despite this broadening of its activities - necessary, as it turned out, because the EPSRC funding was not renewed after the first six years - the Centre was still heavily involved in telecommunications. By 1997, Dr Laming and his team had found a new way to compensate for the way a signal broadens out (or 'chirps') as it passes along a glass fibre. They developed a chirped grating which can be inserted at intervals along a cable recompress broadened signals. This is being marketed worldwide by Pirelli Cables and Systems, which provided multi-million pound funding to the Centre for five years.

Professor Chris Harris, who graduated from Southampton with a PhD in 1972, returned as the Lucas Professor in 1986 to the Aeronautics and Astronautics Department, before moving to Electronics and Computer Science in 1994 to establish the world-renowned image Speech and Intelligent Systems Research Group on neurofuzzy modelling and biometric research. Professors Harris and Gambling were uniquely awarded the highest recognition in electrical and electronic engineering for their research - the Faraday Medal in 2001 and 1982 respectively. Professor David Payne received the USA's equivalent award, the Benjamin Franklin Gold Medal in 1998, reflecting the esteem of Electronics and Computer Science research over the previous two decades.

In the 1985-6 session, under the leadership of David Barron as the founding Professor of Computer Science at Southampton, Computer Studies was transferred from the Faculty of Mathematical Studies and integrated into the Department of Electronics, which now became the Department of Electronics and Computer Science. Two new courses were launched: an MEng in Integrated Information Engineering, and a BSc in Computer Science, which taught the subject as an engineering discipline.

In 1987, as part of the major expansion of Computer Science, two new Professors, Tony Hey and Peter Henderson, were appointed. Hey took charge of the Regional Transputer Support Centre, which was initially funded by the SERC. This was established at Chilworth Research Centre, its purpose to introduce transputer technology to industry. Subsequently the Department's Concurrent Computer Group was to secure a £13 million grant from the DTI to establish one of the country's three Parallel Applications Centres at Chilworth. In 1994, the Parallel Applications Centre was the first UK customer to install an IBM SP2 parallel supercomputer, capable of 1,000 million calculations per second. This followed IBM's choice of Southampton as the (the only UK university in its Shared University Research (SUR) scheme.

One of the projects in the SUR portfolio was networked multimedia, which was a key interest of Wendy Hall. An undergraduate and postgraduate student at Southampton, she had joined the Departmental staff in 1984 and subsequently founded the Multimedia Research Group (MMRG), which became of the most advanced of its kind. In 1994, she became the Engineering Faculty's first female Professor. Her group's pioneering Microcosm hypermedia system was commercialised in 1994 and won a prestigious British Computer Society IT Award in 1996' as well as being a major influence on the WWW Consortium's XML/Xlink standard.

Computer Science at Southampton has continued to grow from strength to strength. Its excellent research track record is evidenced by the fact that in the recent round of EPSRC inter-disciplinary research collaboration (IRC) funding Southampton was involved in two of the five successful bids, becoming the lead site in the Advanced Knowledge Technologies (AKT) IRC and a partner in the Equator IRC. Southampton is now one of the major international research centres in multi-agent systems and, in addition, strength in e-Science and GRID-based computing has led recently to significant funding being awarded to Southampton, making the University a leading centre for research in Computer Science.