Posted on 12/15/2007 7:01:52 AM PST by shrinkermd
...A transistor is a little electronic switch capable of amplifying electric current, invented by John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley at Bell Labs in New Jersey on Dec. 16, 1947. They jury-rigged the first transistor using a paper clip, some germanium and gold foil, and found that it boosted electrical current a hundredfold. They kept the discovery to themselves for a bit, and showed their bosses the device just before Christmas. Bardeen, Brattain and Shockley won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1956.
...To put it in economic terms, if the price of an automobile had kept pace with the price drop of a transistor, we would be paying less for a car than for a slice of pizza.
In the next few years, the question is whether the semiconductor industry can sustain this relentless progress. Further shrinking transistors is proving problematic as certain fundamental physical barriers are being reached. At the same time, new frontiers are opening up. The quest is on to create efficient transistors that use and boost light instead of electricity, which will enable much faster processing speeds.
So on its 60th birthday, answer your cellphone, boot up your computer, flip on your iPod -- and in the process, toast the incredible transistor, the humble electronic switch that, in two human generations, has forever changed how we live, work and play.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
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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