Materials engineers are involved in almost every engineering product, and materials engineers are needed to select the best material, improve its properties, lower its processing cost, and increase its durability. If so, then you've used electronic components that a materials engineer helped design and process, to make them smaller, cheaper, and faster. Each year hundreds of thousands of people benefit from the use of new biomaterials that have been developed by materials engineers. These materials must not only be strong, durable, and resistant to corrosion, but must also be accepted by the body. These materials are the same ones used in the Boeing 767 and the army's Apache Helicopter.
Materials engineers are very versatile, and can work in a wide range of industries.
Almost every industry needs materials engineers to help design their products and factories. Similarly, materials engineers work on magnetic memory devices such as hard drives to lower their prices and increase their capacity. In addition to the microelectronic circuitry, materials engineers work on other important aspects of computers, such as increasing battery lifetime, decreasing power consumption, enhancing monitor resolution, and decreasing weight for easy portability. The replacement of copper wires with fiber optics has revolutionized the telecommunications field, allowing far more signal to be carried at much less cost. Materials engineers continue to increase the quality of fiber optics to increase signal capacity, for applications ranging from high-speed modem lines to picture phones.