Niobium capacitor
The development of solid electrolyte tantalum capacitors began in the early 1950s as a miniaturized, more reliable low-voltage support capacitor to complement the newly invented transistor. The solution found by R. L. Taylor and H. E. Haring of the Bell Labs was based on experience with ceramics. They ground down tantalum to a powder, pressed this powder into a cylindrical form and then sintered the powder particles into a pellet (“slug”) at high temperatures, between 1500 and 2000 °C, under vacuum conditions. These first sintered tantalum capacitors used a non-solid electrolyte not consistent with the concept of solid state electronics. 1952 a targeted search in the Bell Labs for a solid electrolyte by D. A. McLean and F. S. Power led to the invention of manganese dioxide as a solid electrolyte for a sintered tantalum capacitor.
Insulated-gate bipolar transistor
IGBT mode of operation was first proposed by Yamagami in his Japanese patent S47-21739, which was filed in 1968. This mode of operation was first experimentally reported in the lateral four-layer device (SCR) by B. W. Scharf and J. D. Plummer in 1978. This mode of operation was also experimentally discovered in vertical device in 1979 by B. Jayant Baliga. The device structure was referred to as a "V-groove MOSFET device with the drain region replaced by a p-type anode region" in this paper and subsequently as "the insulated-gate rectifier" (IGR), the insulated-gate transistor (IGT), the conductivity-modulated field-effect transistor (COMFET) and "bipolar-mode MOSFET".