Here are some of the significant dates in the evolution of the transistor, which turns 75 in December.
The first transistor was successfully demonstrated at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, in 1947. This three-terminal device has spawned many of the electronics devices that make possible many of the products we take for granted today. From the transistor came MOSFETs in its various incarnations, integrated circuits, and microprocessors.
While early transistors produced humble inventions such as transistor radios, subsequent improvements in transistor technology later produced calculators, personal computers, and power electronics devices.
What follows below is a summary of the more significant developments in the transistor’s rich history. Design News thanks Wikipedia for the information in this story.
Early History
According to Wikipedia, the first patent for the field-effect transistor was filed by Austrian-Hungarian physicist Julius Edgar Lilienfield on October 25, 1925, but as he published no research articles about his devices, his work was ignored by industry.
Bell Lab’s transistor development efforts stemmed from war-time efforts to produce highly pure germanium crystal mixer diodes, used in radar units as a frequency mixer element in microwave radar receivers. After World War II, Bell scientists John Bardeen, William Shockley, and Walter Brattain started work on a triode-like semiconductor device. The trick turned out to be producing consistent electron flow between the device’s emitter and collector, which was made possible by placing the emitter and collector leads very close together with the control lead at the base of the crystal.
A Purdue University graduate student, who joined the research effort, noted that when was applied, there was no resistance, which gave birth to the idea of minority carrier injection.
December 1947: First Working Transistor
Armed with this knowledge, the Bell scientists went through several starts and stops before finally building the first working transistor on December 16, 1947. The point-contact transistor features two closely spaced gold contacts joined by a small piece of germanium.
Barden, Shockley, and Brattain won a Noble Prize in Physics for their efforts.
1954: Moving to Silicon
While the first transistor used germanium, this material was not a practical long-term solution because of its limited operating temperature range and difficulties in purifying the compound. A Bell Labs team led by Morris Tanenbaum developed the first working silicon transistor on January 16, 1954. A similar device was developed by Gordon Teal of Texas Instruments a few months later.
In 1955, Bell Lab scientists discovered the passivating effect of oxidation on the semiconductor surface. The surface passivation method is a key milestone for transistors as it later made possible the mass production of ICs.
1959: Planar Process and MOSFET
The successful demonstration of silicon oxide’s passivation of a silicon surface, first by Mohamed Atalla at Bell Labs and Jean Hoerni of Fairchild led to the planar process, which made the mass production of silicon ICs possible.
Also in 1959, the first MOSFET was produced. The metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET) was invented by Atalla and Dawon Kahng at Bell Labs. They fabricated the device in November 1959 and presented it as the "silicon-silicon dioxide field induced surface device" in early 1960. With its high scalability, and much lower power consumption and higher density than bipolar junction transistors, the MOSFET made it possible to build high-density integrated circuits (ICs) allowing the integration of more than 10,000 transistors in a single IC.
Compared to bipolar transistors, MOSFETs consume no current except when switching states and they have faster switching speed.
1963: CM0S
CMOS (complementary MOS) was invented by Chih-Tang Sah and Frank Wanlass at Fairchild Semiconductor, and in February 1963 they published the invention in a research paper. CMOS technology would prove instrumental in the development of integrated circuits (ICs), including microprocessors, microcontrollers, and memory chips.
1967: Floating Gate Transistor
The first report of a FGMOS was made by Dawon Kahng and Simon Min Sze at Bell Labs and dates from 1967. The floating-gate MOSFET (FGMOS), also known as a floating-gate MOS transistor or floating-gate transistor, is a type of metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET) where the gate is electrically isolated, creating a floating node in direct current, and a number of secondary gates or inputs are deposited above the floating gate (FG) and are electrically isolated from it. These inputs are only capacitively connected to the FG.
Initial applications of FGMOS was digital semiconductor memory, to store nonvolatile