A few weeks ago, we hosted our Legends of Semiconductor dinner, bringing together some of the people who helped build Canada’s semiconductor industry and the next generation of founders and engineers.

One of the legends was Professor Emeritus Adel Sedra, former Dean of Engineering at the University of Waterloo. For many electrical engineering students, Sedra needs no introduction. Microelectronic Circuits, the textbook he co-authored with the late Kenneth Smith, has shaped generations of electrical engineers and, by some estimates, has been used by 75% of electrical engineering students around the world.

At the dinner, the conversation turned to the textbook and which edition each of us had used. Mine was the second edition.

There was only one problem: I had lost my copy.

I was privileged not only to learn from Sedra’s textbook, but also to be one of the students in his classroom when he was a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Toronto. That second edition was the textbook I used as his student more than 30 years ago.

I suspect I lost it during one of our moves. I looked again after the dinner, but couldn’t find it. So I did the next best thing. I found a used copy of the second edition. Same edition, probably similar age, definitely not my copy. I bought it anyway.

This time, I wanted Professor Sedra to autograph it. So I brought the book to Waterloo, where Sedra was meeting with EE students at Williams Cafe. I crashed the party and hijacked their meeting for a few minutes to get my textbook signed.

While I was there, I started chatting with the students and sharing some of my experience as an electrical engineer. One student asked whether I thought EE was getting the spotlight again, after software had taken centre stage for the past couple of decades.

I told them EE is cool again!

Think about what is happening with AI. Everyone talks about the models. But underneath them are GPUs, memory, networking, semiconductors and an enormous amount of computing hardware. All of that hardware needs electricity. Lots of electricity. The entire AI stack, from the chips doing the computation to the power infrastructure keeping data centres running, is bringing electrical engineering back to centre stage.

Sedra immediately corrected me: “EE has always been cool!”

The whole table had a good laugh. And, of course, he was right.

The technologies may be different, but many of the fundamentals are the same. More importantly, so is the way of thinking.

I may never find my original textbook, but I now have the same second edition on my bookshelf again.

This time, signed by my professor!