Department #16 was established in 1991 as a non-structural unit of the Institute and was named “Experimentally engineering department of high-vacuum devices”.

In 2001, the department was incorporated into the business structure of the Institute and was given a status of a structural group, and due to the extension of the research scope it was re-named being now the Department of vacuum electronics.

This department inherited and accumulated the research trends in the vacuum electronics, which were the focal area of the Institute at the time of its foundation. This field was developed jointly by several laboratories that later become structural departments.

Among the participating laboratories were “CG – Continuous Generation” (headed by A.N. Chernets, the Lenin award winner of the USSR in science and engineering), “WBG – Wide-Band Generation” (headed by G.Ya. Levin, the Lenin award winner of the USSR in science and engineering), “PG – Pulse Generation” (headed by I.D. Truten’, the Lenin award winner of the USSR in science and engineering), “OChP – Optics of Charged Particles” (headed by Prof. N.S. Zinchenko, PhD).

The establishment of this department and its following re-arrangements were focused on one main goal – search for new ways and means of designing high-vacuum tubes in the millimeter wave range showing good opportunities both from the theoretical and practical points of view.