I was reading an IEEE paper about the future of Power Electronics and it described the field as "matured", saying the core of power electronics and conversion topologies dont need much more innovation (the work left in PE is mainly EMI filtering, packaging, etc.)

I was wondering about the other fields of EE (that aren't software), what are some examples of "matured" fields and "non-matured" fields? Audio design? Mixed signal IC design? RF?

 

I was reading an IEEE paper about the future of Power Electronics and it described the field as "matured", saying the core of power electronics and conversion topologies dont need much more innovation (the work left in PE is mainly EMI filtering, packaging, etc.)

I was wondering about the other fields of EE (that aren't software), what are some examples of "matured" fields and "non-matured" fields? Audio design? Mixed signal IC design? RF?

Look at the companies hiring electrical engineers. Those growing at 2 or 3% are likely mature, those growing faster, not mature. Most newer things/markets are cross functional or modern applications/new uses of what we know but re-imagined into smaller, lighter, faster, portable uses.

Self-driving cars for example has lots of non-software going on. Look at the explosion of interest at NVIDIA and their graphics processing units. Those same GPUs can drive displays for computers but can also handle machine vision (car's eyes) and the matrix algebra used for artificial intelligence - calculating coefficients for the importance of variables (input categories).

Fuel cells are finally coming into their own - cars on the road from Honda and Toyota - others soon.

Also, if you expand your horizons, there is plenty of business in mature industries. You may not be doing the research/design but tech support, sales engineer, manufacturing/operations engineer, quality, or instrumentation engineer for manufacturing automation.

 

I was reading an IEEE paper about the future of Power Electronics and it described the field as "matured", saying the core of power electronics and conversion topologies dont need much more innovation (the work left in PE is mainly EMI filtering, packaging, etc.)

That reminds me of the time a scientist predicted if a railway train went above 30MPH everyone inside would die because all the air would be sucked out.

Or the marketing survey by IBM predicting their new product of a mainframe computer may have a total sales of some 10 to 15 units. Worldwide!

 

The original IBM PC was projected to only sell 8,000 (or was it 3,000?) units. We placed an order for 400 and were treated as royalty by IBM.

 

The original IBM PC was projected to only sell 8,000 (or was it 3,000?) units. We placed an order for 400 and were treated as royalty by IBM.

My old company placed orders for about 100,000 with Dell every 4 years and they were treated like crap over the past 12 years.