The history of wireless can be broadly classified into three stages: the pioneer, pre-cellular and cellular eras. Guglielmo Marconi's ordeal, although it marked the beginning of the pioneer era, was limited to a primitive form of radio, wireless telegraphy, which was primarily used for ship-to-shore communications.

In a way, he sparked the birth of what was merely a brief detour on the way to modern wireless. Marconi had set the stage for Reginald Fessenden, who took the radio to the next logical step—voice.

After experimenting with radio telephony for some years, Fessenden demonstrated the first radio broadcast from Brant Rock, Massachusetts in 1906, which was heard by ships on the Atlantic shores.

Fessenden, one of the unsung heroes of the wireless age, paved the way for a new generation of pioneers and entrepreneurs. After humble beginnings in wireless telegraphy, the technology flourished in amateur radio, and later, its focus shifted to the broadcast domain.

Broadcast radio had emerged as a killer application by 1924, when radio sets reached millions of households in the Jazz Age. In retrospect, broadcast radio was just a logical extension of amateur radio, and in turn, its growing influence carried the medium to a new realm—television.

Radar was another great leap forward in radio that also spurred tremendous advances in semiconductors, largely due to the fact that radar needed rectifiers able to operate above a few hundred megahertz, where vacuum tubes proved useless. Advances in radar research provided a learning curve and the much-needed impetus for a later breakthrough known to the world as the "transistor."

Like radars, walkie-talkies and other forms of radio communication were perfected during World War II. After the war, manufacturers of these equipment began to look around for commercial applications.

Wireless then matured to enter the second stage of its evolution—pre-cellular—where it would merge with mainstream telecommunications. That included the realization of many specialized forms of two-way radio, the rise and fall of pagers, and cordless phones, which represented just another link in the convergence of wireless and wireline communications.

One important facet of the pre-cellular era was the car-phone service that AT&T first launched in St. Louis in 1946. Essentially a precursor to cellular technology, this service could never enter the mainstream, despite many innovative attempts from Ma Bell.

Although industry observers at that time largely blamed the FCC for not issuing sufficient radio spectrum to favor color television, in retrospect, it's apparent that commercial cellular became a reality in the 1980s and 1990s, only when semiconductors provided the necessary processing power and enabled miniaturization and economy of scale.

A century later, as we enter the post-cellular era, a new wireless enigma promises ubiquitous connectivity through Wi-Fi, UWB, cognitive radios and more. Here, semiconductors have become the paragon of wireless innovation, and in return, new wireless segments are providing the chip industry with the growth engine it now needs most. This symbiosis will be a prominent feature of electronics design in 2006.

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