![]() ![]() Hittinger, the Executive Vice President of Research and Engineering for RCA, was boasting of putting “more than 10,000 electronic components on a silicon ‘chip’ only a few millimeters across.” Today’s transistor densities far exceed these early advances by orders of magnitude. Because MOSFETs could be made increasingly smaller, more and more transistors could be fabricated into an integrated circuit, enabling increasingly complex logical operations.īy 1973, William C. MOSFETs are still the dominant transistor in use today and, as a single unit, are the most manufactured device in human history. In November 1959, Mohamed Atalla and Dawon Kahng at Bell Labs invented the metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET) which used significantly less energy and was much more scalable than Shockley’s bipolar junction transistors. The next major leap came with silicon surface passivation, which allowed silicon to replace germanium as the semiconducting material for transistors, and later, for integrated circuits. Shockley improved on the 1947 design with the bipolar junction transistor in 1948, and it is this implementation that first went into mass production in the 1950s. Although the transistor existed in concept for about 20 years before that-a working model of a transistor was not built until the work was done at Bell Labs. The transistor was “invented” at AT&T’s Bell Labs by John Bardeen and Walter Houser Brattain, under the supervision of William Shockley. This meant that vacuum tube-based electronics are large, hot, and expensive to operate as they require regular maintenance to replace tubes that fail for one reason or another, and can thus bring the entire electronic machine to a halt. They aren’t “solid-state” components, unlike transistors, meaning that they can fail during normal operation because they rely on the movement of electrons flowing within the tube to conduct the electronic current. These vacuum tube triodes were significantly larger than a transistor and required considerably more power to operate. Prior to the transistor, this kind of rapid circuit switching was done using a thermionic valve, which is commonly known as the vacuum tube of old. Generally, one of the terminals is responsible for controlling the flow of current through the other two terminals, which allows for rapid switching in a digital circuit. The transistor is a semiconductor that usually has at least three terminals that can connect to an electrical circuit. History of the Transistor A replica of the first transistor on display at the White House in 2000 | Source: White House Archives That means there is a physical limit to how small a transistor can be.īack when Gordon Moore made his famous prediction about the pace of growth in computing power, no one was really thinking about transistors at nanometer scales.īut as we enter the third decade of the 21st century, our reliance on packing more transistors into the same amount of silicon is brushing up against the very boundaries of what is physically possible, leading many to worry that the pace of innovation we’ve become accustomed to might come to a screeching end in the very near future. A transistor is a physical object, however, and being purely physical it is governed by laws of physics like every other physical object. ![]()
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