A breakthrough in power electronics came with the invention of the MOSFET (metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor) by Mohamed Atalla and Dawon Kahng at Bell Labs in 1959. Generations of MOSFET transistors enabled power designers to achieve performance and density levels not possible with bipolar transistors.[5] Due to improvements in MOSFET technology (initially used to produce integrated circuits), the power MOSFET became available in the 1970s.