Posted on 12/15/2007 7:01:52 AM PST by shrinkermd
The ‘team’ did break up shortly thereafter, largely because Bardeen and Brattain couldn’t bear continuing to work under Shockley.
Shockley went to California and founded, inadvertantly, Silicon Valley.
Bardeen went into academia, where a few years later he and his grad students developed the theory of superconductivity. Another of his grad students helped invent the SCR and the solid state laser.
Want to see where more scaling might come from? Google up the term “Fin FET”.
The one demonstrated in 1947 was a point contact junction transistor, not a FET.
There was work done on a conceptual FET as far back as the 1930’s by Dr. Oskar Heil in Germany; he took out a patent on a device that looked like a triode but the space was filled with semiconductor material instead of a vacuum.
However, nobody could build a practical FET until the 1960’s. By then, the bipolar fabrication technology had advanced along several fronts, such as purity of materials and processes; precision of photlithography; and control of oxide, diffusion, and epitaxial thicknesses. These enabled the fabrication of the first FETs.
I, however, was not.
<}B^)
I did some tech editing once for a physicist from Princeton who had done work for RCA and Delco when those names meant something in America.
He was on the team at Delco who developed the FM transistor radio for GM. They had a horrible time talking GM into offering it in a car. My God, it raised the price of the car nearly $14.00.
I hear ya. Why do you think I line my underwear with aluminum foil?
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