Simple facts
Milestone: Transistor Patent
Date: October 3, 1950
Location: Bell Lab; Murray Hill, New Jersey
WHO: John Bardeen, Walter Blathein, William Shockley
On October 3, 1950, three scientists from Bell Lab in New Jersey obtained a US patent to become one of the most important inventions of the 20th century: transistors.
Transistor was originally designed because AT&T wanted to improve its phone network. At the time, AT&T used TrioDes to amplify and transmit cell phone signals. These devices enveloped the positive and negative terminals and wire mesh within the vacuum tube, allowing electrons to flow without slamming into the air molecules.
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However, the trio was often an overheated power hog, so by the 1930s, President Melvin Kelly of Bell Labs began searching for alternatives. He was intrigued by the possibility of semiconductors that have electrical properties between insulators and conductors. In 1925, Julius Lilienfeld patented the semiconductor precursors of transistors, but using unreliable copper sulfides, the underlying physics was poorly understood.
At the end of World War II, as the lab shifted focus from war technology, Kelly recruited a team led by Shockley to find an alternative to the vacuum tube three-yoze. The team has conducted many experiments, including pushing silicon into a hot thermos, but its success is limited. The problem was that they weren’t amplified much.
Then, in 1947, Brattain and Bardeen switched from silicon to germanium, helping to clarify the physics of semiconductors. Their work led to a “point contact” transistor, using a little spring to push two thin slips of gold leaf into the germanium slab. In particular, this early transistor took some sensitivity to the work, demanding that it was necessary for the Blatein to rock something “just right” and get an impressive 100x amplification of the signal.
In 1948, Shockley’s design was later referred to as the subject of patents that form the basis of most modern transistors, what was later called junction transistors.
The key to this technology is that when voltages are applied to semiconductors, electrons travel within the material, leaving behind a “hole” that is actively charged, according to the patent.
Therefore, it is possible to create “n-type” or “p-type” semiconductors. When a metal electrode contacts a semiconductor, the current flows in one direction when it touches the N-type material in the P-type material, the patent says.
Junction transistors utilize this property in semiconductors with three connected electrodes. By changing the applied voltage and the characteristics of the electrodes and semiconductors, the current can be reliably amplified. This amplification immediately proves invaluable on radio, television and telephone networks.
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However, amplification did not arrive in the modern age of computing. Rather, the junction transistor was a small, reliable, low power “on-off” switch. The vacuum tube was the first computer switch, and the transistor was a much better on/off switch.
Shockley was a notoriously bad boss (and eugenics and racists). The leading researchers went separate ways, and Bardeen moved to the University of Illinois and Shockley to help find the modern Silicon Valley semiconductor industry. The trio won the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on the “transistor effect.”
A few years later, Morris Tanenbaum, a physicochemist who worked temporarily at Bell Labs’ Shockley, invented the first silicon transistor. In 1959, Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments filed a patent for the first integrated circuit. This forms the basis for modern computer chips. And by the early 1960s, vacuum tube computers had become functionally extinct.
In 1968, Intel founder Gordon Moore said that the transistors are miniaturized, chips are twice as powerful at predictable speeds, and the era of Moore’s law continues for another 40 years.
However, as Moore’s law is outdated and AI is constantly demanding powerful computing, scientists have banks that quantum computers that can encode multiple quantum states in Quit or “Quantum Bit” can enter the next era of computing.
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