History of Transistor Year 1906 - an American inventor and physicists, Lee De Forest, made the vacuum tube triode,

or audion as he called it. The triode was a three terminal device that allowed him to make an amplifier for audio signals, making AM radio possible. Radio revolutionized the way in which information and entertainment reached the great majority of people. VACUUM TUBE TRIODE used for rectification, amplification, switching, or similar processing or creation of electrical signals. Vacuum tubes rely on thermionic emission of electrons from a hot filament or hot cathode, that then travel through a vacuum toward the anode (commonly called the plate), which is held at a positive voltage relative to the cathode. Additional electrodes interposed between the cathode and anode can alter the current, giving the tube the ability to amplify and switch. A highly evacuated electron tube containing an anode, a cathode, and a control grid. Year- 1940's and early 1950's.- The vacuum tube triode helped push the development of computers forward a great deal. Electronic tubes were used in several different computer designs. But, the limits of these tubes were soon reached. As the electric circuits became more complicated, one needed more and more triodes. Engineers packed several triodes into one vacuum tube (that is why the tube has so many legs) to make the tube circuits more efficient. The vacuum tubes tended to leak, and the metal that emitted electrons in the vacuum tubes burned out. The tubes also required so much power that big and complicated circuits were too large and took too much energy to run.

Lee De Forest (aug.26,1873-june 30,1961) Triodes as they evolved over 40 years of tube manufacture, from the RE16 in 1918 to a 1960's era miniature tube.

Year 1947 - John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, working at Bell Telephone Laboratories, were trying to understand the nature of the electrons at the interface between a metal and a semiconductor. They realized that by making two point contacts very close to one another, they could make a three terminal device - the first "point contact" transistor. John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, working at Bell Telephone Laboratories, were trying to understand the nature of the electrons at the interface between a metal and a semiconductor. They realized that by making two point contacts very close to one another, they could make a three terminal device - the first "point contact" transistor. This invention was the spark that ignited a huge research effort in solid state electronics. Bardeen and Brattain received the Nobel Prize in Physics, 1956, together with William Shockley, "for their researches on semiconductors and their discovery of the transistor effect." Shockley had developed a so-called junction transistor, which was built on thin slices of different types of semiconductor material pressed together. The junction transistor was easier to understand theoretically, and could be manufactured more reliably.

The first contact transistor

For many years, transistors were made as individual electronic components and were connected to other electronic components (resistors, capacitors, inductors, diodes, etc.) on boards to make an electronic circuit. They were much smaller than vacuum tubes and consumed much less power. Electronic circuits could be made more complex, with more transistors switching faster than tubes. However, it did not take long before the limits of this circuit construction technique were reached. Circuits based on individual transistors became too large and too difficult to assemble. There were simply too many electronic components to deal with. The transistor circuits were faster than vacuum tube circuits, and there were noticeable problems due to time delays for electric signals to propagate a long distance in these large circuits. To make the circuits even faster, one needed to pack the transistors closer and closer together.

The Integrated Circuit Integrated circuits placed all components in one chip, drastically reducing the size of the circuit and its components.

In 1958 and 1959, Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments and Robert Noyce at Fairchild Camera, came up with a solution to the problem of large numbers of components, and the integrated circuit was developed. Instead of making transistors one-by-one, several transistors could be made at the same time, on the same piece of semiconductor. Not only transistors, but other electric components such as resistors, capacitors and diodes could be made by the same process with the same materials. For more than 30 years, since the 1960's, the number of transistors per unit area has been doubling every 1.5 years. This fantastic progression of circuit fabrication is known as Moore's law, after Gordon Moore, one of the early integrated circuit pioneers and founders of Intel Corporation. The Nobel Prize in Physics 2000 was awarded to Jack Kilby for the invention of the integrated circuit. From the dawn of the vacuum tube triode, to the discovery of the transistor and the development of the integrated circuit, the 20th century has certainly been the century of electronics.

John Bardeen (May 23, 1908 January 30, 1991)

(February 10, 1902 October 13, 1987
(February 13, 1910 August 12, 1989)

Jack Kilby (November 8, 1923 June 20, 2005)

A transistor is a semiconductor device used to amplify and switch electronic signals and power. It is composed of a semiconductor material with at least three terminals for connection to an external circuit. A voltage or current applied to one pair of the transistor's terminals changes the current flowing through another pair of terminals. Because the controlled (output) power can be much more than the controlling (input) power, a transistor can amplify a signal. Today, some transistors are packaged individually, but many more are found embedded in integrated circuits.