Radu Sporea, University of Surrey – Technological Nomenclature

Dr. Radu Sporea

Every commercial for new electronics is packed with flashy tech terminology meant to entice you into thinking you need this new device.

Radu Sporea, professor of engineering at The University of Surrey and The Academic Minute‘s resident technology expert, analyzes the way we talk about technology and electronics.

Dr. Radu Sporea is Royal Academy of Engineering Academic Research Fellow in the Advanced Technology Institute at the University of Surrey. His current research focuses on power-efficient, cost-effective large-area electronics in organic and inorganic semiconductor technologies. Additionally, Dr. Sporea enjoys traveling, podcasting, photography and public engagement in science.

Technological Nomenclature

Shakespeare’s Juliet may have asked “what’s in a name?” philosophically, but in the world of consumer electronics, it’s big bucks!

Take the ever-present flat screen. We’re surrounded by them; they’re in our phones, laptops and TVs. The great majority are liquid crystal displays, or LCDs, which create the image by selectively blocking the light coming from a fluorescent backlight.

The technology has been on the market for decades and has never stood still, but a few years back we’ve been treated to a seemingly new offering: the LED TV. You’d be tempted to believe that this might be a radical new way of building moving images, but this is a mere upgrade of the conventional LCD technology. The fluorescent backlight is replaced with light emitting diodes, hence the name, and that allows for slimmer, more elegant designs, reduced cost and energy demands, and somewhat better image quality. All good things, but the screen works on the same old LCD principle.

True LED displays, which have just started to be offered, work in a completely different way. The image they produce is created by millions of individual light sources which shine brighter or dimmer, having the tremendous benefit of drawing very little power when displaying a dark image. Reliability and cost are still an issue, but in some ways this might be the future, so you can see why LCD manufacturers would want to associate the LED label with their old-school but still enormously capable products.

Consumer electronics are evolving constantly and even an established technology is bound to be unrecognizable a few years into the future. A rose may be a rose by any other name, as Shakespeare put it, but a showy new name can give it a new lease on life- just ask the marketing department!