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(December 2010)| The field-effect transistor (FET) is a
transistor that uses an electric field to control the shape and
hence the conductivity of a channel of one type of charge
carrier in a semiconductor material. FETs are unipolar
transistors as they involve single-carrier-type operation. The
concept of the FET predates the Bipolar junction transistor
(BJT), though it was not physically implemented until after BJTs
due to the limitations of semiconductor materials and the
relative ease of manufacturing BJTs compared to FETs at the
time. The field-effect transistor was first patented by Julius
Edgar Lilienfeld in 1926 and by Oskar Heil in 1934, but
practical semi-conducting devices (the JFET) were developed only
much later after the transistor effect was observed and
explained by the team of William Shockley at Bell Labs in 1947.
The MOSFET, which largely superseded the JFET and had a more
profound effect on electronic development, was invented by D