When were transistors first invented?
Consumer electronics
For its first fifty years the phonograph turntable did not use electronics; the needle and soundhorn were purely mechanical technologies. However, in the 1920s radio broadcasting became the basis of mass production of radio receivers. The vacuum tubes that had made radios practical were used with record players as well, to amplify the sound so that it could be played through a loudspeaker. Television was soon invented, but remained insignificant in the consumer market until the 1950s. The transistor, invented in 1947 by Bell Laboratories, led to significant research in the field of solid-state semiconductors in the early 1950s. The transistor's advantages revolutionized that industry along with other electronics. By 1959 Fairchild Semiconductor had introduced the first planar transistor from which come the origins of Moore's law. Integrated circuits followed when manufacturers built circuits (usually for military purposes) on a single substrate using electrical connections between circuits within the chip itself. Bell's invention of the transistor and the development of semiconductors led to far better and cheaper consumer electronics, such as transistor radios, televisions, and by the 1980s, affordable video game consoles and personal computers that regular middle-class families could buy.
United States
The invention of the transistor in the 1950s, a key active component in practically all modern electronics, led to many technological developments and a significant expansion of the U.S. technology industry. This, in turn, led to the establishment of many new technology companies and regions around the country such as Silicon Valley in California. Advancements by American microprocessor companies such as Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), and Intel along with both computer software and hardware companies that include Adobe Systems, Apple Inc., IBM, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems created and popularized the personal computer. The ARPANET was developed in the 1960s to meet Defense Department requirements, and became the first of a series of networks which evolved into the Internet.
Morris Tanenbaum
On January 26, 1954, Tanenbaum recorded a successful demonstration of the first silicon transistor in his logbook. However, Bell Laboratories did not draw attention to Tanenbaum's discovery publicly. The successful transistor had been constructed using a rate-growing process, which was felt to be poorly suited to large-scale manufacturing. Diffusion processes, pioneered by Bell's Calvin Fuller, were seen as more promising. Tanenbaum became the team leader for a group studying diffusion's possible application to the fabrication of silicon transistors.
Invention of the integrated circuit
In May 1952, Sidney Darlington filed a patent application in the United States for a structure with two or three transistors integrated onto a single chip in various configurations; in October 1952, Bernard Oliver filed a patent application for a method of manufacturing three electrically connected planar transistors on one semiconductor crystal. On May 21, 1953, Harwick Johnson filed a patent application for a method of forming various electronic components – transistors, resistors, lumped and distributed capacitances – on a single chip. Johnson described three ways of producing an integrated one-transistor oscillator. All of them used a narrow strip of a semiconductor with a bipolar transistor on one end and differed in the methods of producing the transistor. The strip acted as a series of resistors; the lumped capacitors were formed by fusion whereas inverse-biased p-n junctions acted as distributed capacitors. Johnson did not offer a technological procedure, and it is not known whether he produced an actual device. In 1959, a variant of his proposal was implemented and patented by Jack Kilby.
Transistor–transistor logic
TTL was invented in 1961 by James L. Buie of TRW, which declared it, "particularly suited to the newly developing integrated circuit design technology." The original name for TTL was "transistor-coupled transistor logic" (TCTL). The first commercial integrated-circuit TTL devices were manufactured by Sylvania in 1963, called the Sylvania Universal High-Level Logic family (SUHL). The Sylvania parts were used in the controls of the Phoenix missile. TTL became popular with electronic systems designers after Texas Instruments introduced the 5400 series of ICs, with military temperature range, in 1964 and the later 7400 series, specified over a narrower range and with inexpensive plastic packages, in 1966.
Solid-state electronics
The term "solid state" became popular in the beginning of the semiconductor era in the 1960s to distinguish this new technology based on the transistor, in which the electronic action of devices occurred in a solid state, from previous electronic equipment that used vacuum tubes, in which the electronic action occurred in a gaseous state. A semiconductor device works by controlling an electric current consisting of electrons or holes moving within a solid crystalline piece of semiconducting material such as silicon, while the thermionic vacuum tubes it replaced worked by controlling current conducted by a gas of particles, electrons or ions, moving in a vacuum within a sealed tube. Although the first solid state electronic device was the cat's whisker detector, a crude semiconductor diode invented around 1904, solid state electronics really started with the invention of the transistor in 1947. Before that, all electronic equipment used vacuum tubes, because vacuum tubes were the only electronic components that could "amplify", an essential capability in all electronics. The replacement of bulky, fragile, energy-wasting vacuum tubes by transistors in the 1960s and 1970s created a revolution not just in technology but in people's habits, making possible the first truly portable consumer electronics such as the transistor radio, cassette tape player, walkie-talkie and quartz watch, as well as the first practical computers and mobile phones.
Electric organ
Electronic organs before the mid-1950s had used vacuum tubes which tended to be bulky and unstable. This restricted attempts to extend features and spread their use into homes. Transistors, invented at Bell Labs in 1947, went into practical production in the 1950s, and their small size and stability led to major changes in the production of electronics equipment, in what has been termed the "transistor revolution".
Silicon Valley
In 1953, William Shockley left Bell Labs in a disagreement over the handling of the invention of the transistor. After returning to California Institute of Technology for a short while, Shockley moved to Mountain View, California, in 1956, and founded Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory. Unlike many other researchers who used germanium as the semiconductor material, Shockley believed that silicon was the better material for making transistors. Shockley intended to replace the current transistor with a new three-element design (today known as the Shockley diode), but the design was considerably more difficult to build than the "simple" transistor. In 1957, Shockley decided to end research on the silicon transistor. As a result of Shockley's abusive management style, eight engineers left the company to form Fairchild Semiconductor; Shockley referred to them as the "traitorous eight". Two of the original employees of Fairchild Semiconductor, Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, would go on to found Intel.
Timeline of United States inventions (1946–1991)
In electronics, a transistor is a semiconductor device commonly used to amplify or switch electronic signals. Because the controlled output power can be much larger than the controlling input power, the transistor provides amplification of a signal. The transistor is the fundamental building block of all modern electronic devices, and is used in radio, telephone, computer, and other electronic systems. From November 17, 1947 to December 23, 1947, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain at AT&T Bell Labs, underwent experimentations and finally observed that when two gold point contacts were applied to a crystal of germanium, a signal was produced whereby the output power was larger than the input. The manager of the Bell Labs semiconductor research group, William Shockley, saw the potential in this and worked over the next few months greatly expanding the knowledge of semiconductors in order to construct the first point-contact transistor. Shockley is considered by many to be the "father" of the transistor. Hence, in recognition of his work, the transistor is widely, yet not universally acknowledged as the most important invention of the entire 20th century since it forms today's building blocks of processors found and used in almost every modern computing and electronics device. In recognition of their invention of the transistor, Shockley, Bardeen and Brattain were jointly awarded the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Nanoelectronics
In 1999, the CMOS transistor developed at the Laboratory for Electronics and Information Technology in Grenoble, France, tested the limits of the principles of the MOSFET transistor with a diameter of 18 nm (approximately 70 atoms placed side by side). This was almost one tenth the size of the smallest industrial transistor in 2003 (130 nm in 2003, 90 nm in 2004, 65 nm in 2005 and 45 nm in 2007). It enabled the theoretical integration of seven billion junctions on a €1 coin. However, the CMOS transistor, which was created in 1999, was not a simple research experiment to study how CMOS technology functions, but rather a demonstration of how this technology functions now that we ourselves are getting ever closer to working on a molecular scale. Today it would be impossible to master the coordinated assembly of a large number of these transistors on a circuit and it would also be impossible to create this on an industrial level.
Carver Mead
Stimulated by Moore's question, Mead and his students began a physics-based analysis of possible materials, trying to determine a lower bound for Moore's Law. In 1968, Mead demonstrated, contrary to common assumptions, that as transistors decreased in size, they would not become more fragile or hotter or more expensive or slower. Rather, he argued that transistors would get faster, better, cooler and cheaper as they were miniaturized. His results were initially met with considerable skepticism, but as designers experimented, more and more results supported his assertion. In 1972, Mead and graduate student Bruce Hoeneisen predicted that transistors could be made as small as 0.15 microns. This lower limit to transistor size was considerably smaller than had been generally expected. Despite initial doubts, Mead's prediction influenced the computer industry's development of submicron technology. When Mead's predicted target was achieved in actual transistor development in 2000, the transistor was highly similar to the one Mead had originally described.
History of the transistor
Further developments included the grown-junction transistor (1951), the surface-barrier transistor (1953), the diffusion transistor, the tetrode transistor, and the pentode transistor. The diffused silicon 'mesa transistor' was developed at Bell in 1955 and made commercially available by Fairchild Semiconductor in 1958. The spacistor was a type of transistor developed in the 1950s as an improvement over the point-contact transistor and the later alloy junction transistor.
Surface-barrier transistor
In 1956-57, Remington Rand St. Paul Univac-division of Sperry Rand Corporation, had designed and built a transistorized "test" computer for the United States Air Force, which was called "TRANSTEC". It was designed by Univac's St. Paul engineer Seymour Cray, and used the Philco's high-frequency surface-barrier transistors in its computer's circuitry design. This was Univac's first computer designed with transistors and was used to test transistor logic circuits and also its speed and reliability, compared to magnetic amplifier (MAGSTEC) and vacuum tube circuit computers. After Univac had demonstrated the TRANSTEC computer to the United States Air Force, it was awarded a contract to build a transistorized ground guidance (Athena) ICBM defense computer.
History of electrical engineering
The invention of the transistor in 1947 by William B. Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain opened the door for more compact devices and led to the development of the integrated circuit in 1958 by Jack Kilby and independently in 1959 by Robert Noyce. In the mid to late 1950s, the term radio engineering gradually gave way to the name electronics engineering, which then became a stand-alone university degree subject, usually taught alongside electrical engineering with which it had become associated due to some similarities. In 1968 Marcian Hoff invented the first microprocessor at Intel and thus ignited the development of the personal computer. The first realization of the microprocessor was the Intel 4004, a 4-bit processor developed in 1971, but only in 1973 did the Intel 8080, an 8-bit processor, make the building of the first personal computer, the Altair 8800, possible.
Electrical engineering
The invention of the transistor in late 1947 by William Shockley, John Bardeen, and Walter Brattain of the Bell Telephone Laboratories opened the door for more compact devices and led to the development of the integrated circuit in 1958 by Jack Kilby and independently in 1959 by Robert Noyce.
History of the transistor
On 15 December 1947, "When the points were, very close together got voltage amp about 2 but not power amp. This voltage amplification was independent of frequency 10 to 10,000 cycles".
Herbert Mataré
At the same time as the American researchers and independently, the German researchers Mataré and Heinrich Welker developed the first operational "French transistor" at Compagnie des Freins & Signaux Westinghouse in Aulnay-sous-Bois near Paris during the years 1945 to 1948. They filed their first transistor patent application on 13 August 1948. On 18 May 1949, this European invention coined as the "Le Transistron" was presented to the public.
Bell Labs
In 1947, the transistor, probably the most important invention developed by Bell Laboratories, was invented by John Bardeen, Walter Houser Brattain, and William Bradford Shockley (and who subsequently shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1956). In 1947, Richard Hamming invented Hamming codes for error detection and correction. For patent reasons, the result was not published until 1950. In 1948, "A Mathematical Theory of Communication", one of the founding works in information theory, was published by Claude Shannon in the "Bell System Technical Journal". It built in part on earlier work in the field by Bell researchers Harry Nyquist and Ralph Hartley, but it greatly extended these. Bell Labs also introduced a series of increasingly complex calculators through the decade. Shannon was also the founder of modern cryptography with his 1949 paper "Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems".In 1952, William Gardner Pfann revealed the method of zone melting which enabled semiconductor purification and level doping.
Marc A. Kastner
In 1990, his group at MIT discovered the single electron transistor. It is a device in which electrostatic fields confine electrons to a small region of space inside a semiconductor. Single electron transistors turn on and off again every time one electron is added. In an interview, he said that the discovery that a transistor could turn on and off again every time an electron was added to it was one of the most astounding and exciting experiences of his life.
Transistor computer
The Philco Transac models S-1000 scientific computer and S-2000 electronic data processing computer were early commercially produced large-scale all-transistor computers; they were announced in 1957 but did not ship until sometime after the fall of 1958. The Philco computer name "Transac" stands for Transistor-Automatic-Computer. Both of these Philco computer models used the surface-barrier transistor in their circuitry designs, the world's first high-frequency transistor suitable for high-speed computers. The surface-barrier transistor was developed by Philco in 1953.
History of the transistor
Metropolitan Vickers Ltd rebuilt the full 200 transistor (& 1300 diode) design in 1956 using junction transistors (for internal use).
Morris Tanenbaum
Finding better semiconductor materials to support the "transistor effect" was a critical area of research at Bell. Gordon Teal and technician Ernest Buehler did pioneering research on the growing and doping of semiconductor crystals between 1949 and 1952. Teal's group built the first grown-junction germanium transistors, which were announced by Shockley at a press conference on July 4, 1951. Meanwhile, Gerald Pearson did important early work investigating the properties of silicon.
Valve amplifier
Until the invention of the transistor in 1947, most practical high-frequency electronic amplifiers were made using thermionic valves. The simplest valve was invented by John Ambrose Fleming while working for the Marconi Company in London in 1904 and named the diode, as it had two electrodes. The diode conducted electricity in one direction only and was used as a radio detector and a rectifier.
Invention of the integrated circuit
In 1952, Jewell James Ebers from Bell Labs developed a prototype solid-state analog of thyratron – a four-layer transistor, or thyristor. William Shockley simplified its design to a two-terminal "four-layer diode" (Shockley diode) and attempted its industrial production. Shockley hoped that the new device will replace the polarized relay in telephone exchanges; however, the reliability of Shockley diodes was unacceptably low, and his company went into decline.
Ieuan Maddock
Maddock worked for this department as an experimental officer until 1944 when he transferred to the Armament Research Department in Fort Halstead. Initially, he studied the creation of common explosions here, and in 1947 he specialised in appliances for nuclear explosions. Following the invention of the transistor in 1947, along with Maddock's application of electronic instruments, he obtained measurements of the speed of detonation and time of the projectiles' flight with greater accuracy.
Morris Tanenbaum
In the meantime, Gordon Teal had moved to Texas Instruments, where he was essential to the organization of TI's research department. He also led its team of silicon transistor researchers. On April 14, 1954 he and Willis Adcock successfully tested and demonstrated the first grown-junction silicon transistor. Like Tanenbaum, they used highly purified DuPont silicon. Teal was able to bring the silicon transistor to production. He announced the results and displayed the TI transistors on May 10, 1954 at the Institute of Radio Engineers (IRE) National Conference on Airborne Electronics, in Dayton, Ohio.
History of the transistor
Bray wrote: "That was the one aspect that we missed, but even had we understood the idea of minority carrier injection...we would have said, 'Oh, this explains our effects.' We might not necessarily have gone ahead and said, 'Let's start making transistors,' open up a factory and sell them... At that time the important device was the high back voltage rectifier".
William Shockley
The ensuing publicity generated by the "invention of the transistor" often thrust Shockley to the fore, much to the chagrin of Bardeen and Brattain. Bell Labs management, however, consistently presented all three inventors as a team. Though Shockley would correct the record where reporters gave him sole credit for the invention, he eventually infuriated and alienated Bardeen and Brattain, and he essentially blocked the two from working on the junction transistor. Bardeen began pursuing a theory for superconductivity and left Bell Labs in 1951. Brattain refused to work with Shockley further and was assigned to another group. Neither Bardeen nor Brattain had much to do with the development of the transistor beyond the first year after its invention.
Electronics
In April 1955, the IBM 608 was the first IBM product to use transistor circuits without any vacuum tubes and is believed to be the first all-transistorized calculator to be manufactured for the commercial market. The 608 contained more than 3,000 germanium transistors. Thomas J. Watson Jr. ordered all future IBM products to use transistors in their design. From that time on transistors were almost exclusively used for computer logic and peripherals.
Transistor
The first working silicon transistor was developed at Bell Labs on January 26, 1954 by Morris Tanenbaum. The first commercial silicon transistor was produced by Texas Instruments in 1954. This was the work of Gordon Teal, an expert in growing crystals of high purity, who had previously worked at Bell Labs. The first MOSFET actually built was by Kahng and Atalla at Bell Labs in 1960.
Semiconductor device
Bell Telephone Laboratories needed a generic name for their new invention: "Semiconductor Triode", "Solid Triode", "Surface States Triode", "Crystal Triode" and "Iotatron" were all considered, but "transistor", coined by John R. Pierce, won an internal ballot. The rationale for the name is described in the following extract from the company's Technical Memoranda (May 28, 1948) [26] calling for votes:
Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory
William Shockley received his undergraduate degree from Caltech and moved east to complete his PhD at MIT. He graduated in 1936 and immediately started work at Bell Labs. Through the 1930s and '40s he worked on electron devices, and increasingly with semiconductor materials. This led to the 1947 creation of the first transistor, in partnership with John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and others. Through the early 1950s a series of events led to Shockley becoming increasingly upset with Bell's management, and especially what he saw as a slighting when Bell promoted Bardeen and Brattain's names ahead of his own on the transistor's patent. However, others that worked with him suggested the reason for these issues was Shockley's abrasive management style, and it was this reason that he was constantly passed over for promotion within the company. These issues came to a head in 1953 and he took a sabbatical and returned to Caltech as a visiting professor.
Transistor radio
There are many claimants to the title of the first company to produce practical transistor radios, often incorrectly attributed to Sony (originally Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation). Texas Instruments had demonstrated all-transistor AM (amplitude modulation) radios as early as May 25, 1954, but their performance was well below that of equivalent vacuum tube models. A workable all-transistor radio was demonstrated in August 1953 at the Düsseldorf Radio Fair by the German firm Intermetall. It was built with four of Intermetall's hand-made transistors, based upon the 1948 invention of the "Transistron"-germanium point-contact transistor by Herbert Mataré and Heinrich Welker. However, as with the early Texas Instruments units (and others) only prototypes were ever built; it was never put into commercial production. RCA had demonstrated a prototype transistor radio as early as 1952, and it is likely that they and the other radio makers were planning transistor radios of their own, but Texas Instruments and Regency Division of I.D.E.A., were the first to offer a production model starting in October 1954.
The use of transistors instead of vacuum tubes as the amplifier elements meant that the device was much smaller, required far less power to operate than a tube radio, and was more shock-resistant. Since the transistor base draws current, its input impedance is low in contrast to the high input impedance of the vacuum tubes. It also allowed "instant-on" operation, since there were no filaments to heat up. The typical portable tube radio of the fifties was about the size and weight of a lunchbox, and contained several heavy, non-rechargeable batteries— one or more so-called "A" batteries to heat the tube filaments and a large 45- to 90-volt "B" battery to power the signal circuits. By comparison, the transistor radio could fit in a pocket and weighed half a pound or less, and was powered by standard flashlight batteries or a single compact 9-volt battery. The now-familiar 9-volt battery was introduced for powering transistor radios.
Miniaturization
The history of miniaturization is associated with the history of information technology based on the succession of switching devices, each smaller, faster, cheaper than its predecessor. During the period referred to as the Second Industrial Revolution, miniaturization was confined to two-dimensional electronic circuits used for the manipulation of information. This orientation is demonstrated in the use of vacuum tubes in the first general-purpose computers. The technology gave way to the transistor invented in the 1950s and then the integrated circuit approach developed afterward.
John Bardeen
Shockley publicly took the lion's share of the credit for the invention of transistor; this led to a deterioration of Bardeen's relationship with Shockley. Bell Labs management, however, consistently presented all three inventors as a team. Shockley eventually infuriated and alienated Bardeen and Brattain, and he essentially blocked the two from working on the junction transistor. Bardeen began pursuing a theory for superconductivity and left Bell Labs in 1951. Brattain refused to work with Shockley further and was assigned to another group. Neither Bardeen nor Brattain had much to do with the development of the transistor beyond the first year after its invention.
Field-effect transistor
The field-effect transistor was first patented by Julius Edgar Lilienfeld in 1926 and by Oskar Heil in 1934, but practical semiconducting devices (the junction field-effect transistors [JFETs]) were developed later after the transistor effect was observed and explained by the team of William Shockley at Bell Labs in 1947, shortly after the 17-year patent period eventually expired.
Transistor
The thermionic triode, a vacuum tube invented in 1907, enabled amplified radio technology and long-distance telephony. The triode, however, was a fragile device that consumed a substantial amount of power. In 1909 physicist William Eccles discovered the crystal diode oscillator. Physicist Julius Edgar Lilienfeld filed a patent for a field-effect transistor (FET) in Canada in 1925 , which was intended to be a solid-state replacement for the triode. Lilienfeld also filed identical patents in the United States in 1926 and 1928. However, Lilienfeld did not publish any research articles about his devices nor did his patents cite any specific examples of a working prototype. Because the production of high-quality semiconductor materials was still decades away, Lilienfeld's solid-state amplifier ideas would not have found practical use in the 1920s and 1930s, even if such a device had been built. In 1934, German inventor Oskar Heil patented a similar device in Europe.
Transistor radio
Bell Laboratories demonstrated the first transistor on December 23, 1947. The scientific team at Bell Laboratories responsible for the solid-state amplifier included William Shockley, Walter Houser Brattain, and John Bardeen. After obtaining patent protection, the company held a news conference on June 30, 1948, at which a prototype transistor radio was demonstrated.
History of radio
In 1954 Regency introduced a pocket transistor radio, the TR-1, powered by a "standard 22.5V Battery". In 1960 Sony introduced their first transistorized radio, small enough to fit in a vest pocket, and able to be powered by a small battery. It was durable, because there were no tubes to burn out. Over the next twenty years, transistors displaced tubes almost completely except for picture tubes and very high power or very high frequency uses.
History of science and technology in Japan
Neodymium magnets were invented independently in 1982 by General Motors (GM) and Sumitomo Special Metals. It is the most widely used type of rare-earth magnet.In 1950, the static induction transistor was invented by Jun-ichi Nishizawa and Y. Watanabe. It was the first type of JFET (junction gate field-effect transistor), with a short channel length. In 1971, Jun-ichi Nishizawa invented the static induction thyristor.The PIN diode/photodiode was invented by Jun-ichi Nishizawa and his colleagues in 1950. This was the basis for the laser diode. In 1952, Nishizawa invented the avalanche photodiode. Nishizawa also introduced tunnel injection in 1958, and invented the varicap (variable capacitance diode) in 1959.In 1955, Jun-ichi Nishizawa invented the first solid-state maser. In 1957, Nishizawa invented the semiconductor laser, and discovered semiconductor inductance.
Transistor
The transistor is the key active component in practically all modern electronics. Many consider it to be one of the greatest inventions of the 20th century. Its importance in today's society rests on its ability to be mass-produced using a highly automated process (semiconductor device fabrication) that achieves astonishingly low per-transistor costs. The invention of the first transistor at Bell Labs was named an IEEE Milestone in 2009.
History of computing hardware
The Manchester University Transistor Computer's design was adopted by the local engineering firm of Metropolitan-Vickers in their Metrovick 950, the first commercial transistor computer anywhere. Six Metrovick 950s were built, the first completed in 1956. They were successfully deployed within various departments of the company and were in use for about five years. A second generation computer, the IBM 1401, captured about one third of the world market. IBM installed more than ten thousand 1401s between 1960 and 1964.
Transistor
The first high-frequency transistor was the surface-barrier germanium transistor developed by Philco in 1953, capable of operating up to . These were made by etching depressions into an N-type germanium base from both sides with jets of Indium(III) sulfate until it was a few ten-thousandths of an inch thick. Indium electroplated into the depressions formed the collector and emitter.
MOSFET
The basic principle of this kind of transistor was first patented by Julius Edgar Lilienfeld in 1925.
Semiconductor device
Shockley was incensed, and decided to demonstrate who was the real brains of the operation. A few months later he invented an entirely new, considerably more robust, type of transistor with a layer or 'sandwich' structure. This structure went on to be used for the vast majority of all transistors into the 1960s, and evolved into the bipolar junction transistor.
Invention of the integrated circuit
On December 1, 1957, Jean Hoerni first proposed a planar technology of bipolar transistors. In this process, all the p-n junctions were covered by a protective layer, which should significantly improve reliability. However, in 1957, this proposal was considered technically impossible. The formation of the emitter of an n-p-n transistor required diffusion of phosphorus, and the work of Frosch suggested that SiO does not block such diffusion. In March 1959, Chi-Tang Sah, a former colleague of Hoerni, pointed Hoerni and Noyce to an error in the conclusions of Frosch. Frosch used a thin oxide layer, whereas the experiments of 1957–1958 showed that a thick layer of oxide can stop the phosphorus diffusion. Armed with this knowledge, by March 12, 1959 Hoerni made the first prototype of a planar transistor, and on May 1, 1959 filed a patent application for the invention of the planar process. In April 1960, Fairchild launched the planar transistor 2N1613, and by October 1960 completely abandoned the mesa transistor technology. By the mid-1960s, the planar process has become the main technology of producing transistors and monolithic integrated circuits.
Power electronics
In 1947 the bipolar point-contact transistor was invented by Walter H. Brattain and John Bardeen under the direction of William Shockley at Bell Labs. In 1948 Shockley's invention of the bipolar junction transistor (BJT) improved the stability and performance of transistors, and reduced costs. By the 1950s, higher power semiconductor diodes became available and started replacing vacuum tubes. In 1956 the silicon controlled rectifier (SCR) was introduced by General Electric, greatly increasing the range of power electronics applications.
Walter Houser Brattain
Shockley believed (and stated) that he should have received all the credit for the discovery of the transistor. He actively excluded Bardeen and Brattain from new areas of research, in particular the junction transistor, which Shockley patented. Shockley's theory of the junction transistor was an "impressive achievement", pointing the way to future solid-state electronics, but it would be several years before its construction would become practically possible.
Radio receiver
The invention of the transistor in 1947 revolutionized radio technology, making truly portable receivers possible, beginning with transistor radios in the late 1950s. Although portable vacuum tube radios were made, tubes were bulky and inefficient, consuming large amounts of power and requiring several large batteries to produce the filament and plate voltage. Transistors did not require a heated filament, reducing power consumption, and were smaller and much less fragile than vacuum tubes.
History of Santa Clara County, California
In 1953, William Shockley left Bell Labs in a disagreement over the handling of the invention of the transistor. After returning to California Institute of Technology for a short while, in 1956 Shockley moved to Mountain View, California, and created Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory. Unlike many other researchers who used germanium as the semiconductor material, Shockley believed that silicon was the better material for making transistors. Shockley intended to replace the current transistor with a new three-element design (today known as the Shockley diode), but the design was considerably more difficult to build than the "simple" transistor. In 1957, Shockley decided to end research on the silicon transistor. As a result, the "traitorous eight" engineers left the company to form Fairchild Semiconductor. Two of the original employees of Fairchild Semiconductor, Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, would go on to found Intel. In 1971, Intel created the first microprocessor, the Intel 4004. The next step in the Silicon Valley revolution occurred in March 1975, when the Homebrew Computer Club in Menlo Park was created by students with an interest in technology and a desire to experiment with building home computers. Steve Wozniak, a founding member, built a home computer from a cheap microprocessor, and showed it to his fellow club members, who included his friend Steve Jobs. Together, in Steve Job's garage in Cupertino, Wozniak and Jobs formed Apple Computer. By 1976 Apple's first personal computer, the Apple I, was being sold.
History of computing hardware
The bipolar transistor was invented in 1947. From 1955 onward transistors replaced vacuum tubes in computer designs, giving rise to the "second generation" of computers. Initially the only devices available were germanium point-contact transistors. Compared to vacuum tubes, transistors have many advantages: they are smaller, and require less power than vacuum tubes, so give off less heat. Silicon junction transistors were much more reliable than vacuum tubes and had longer, indefinite, service life. Transistorized computers could contain tens of thousands of binary logic circuits in a relatively compact space. Transistors greatly reduced computers' size, initial cost, and operating cost.
Typically, second-generation computers were composed of large numbers of printed circuit boards such as the IBM Standard Modular System
each carrying one to four logic gates or flip-flops.
History of the transistor
A transistor is a semiconductor device with at least three terminals for connection to an electric circuit. The vacuum-tube 
triode, also called a (thermionic) valve, was the transistor's precursor, introduced in 1907.
Surface-barrier transistor
The Philco high-frequency surface-barrier transistor was also the first transistor that was suitable for high-speed computers. Philco developed and produced a miniature transistorized computer brain called the "Transac" (models C-1000 and C-1100), for the Navy's jet fighter planes in 1955. "Transac" stood for "Transistor Automatic Computer." They used Philco's high-frequency surface-barriers transistors.
Digital electronics
At the same time that digital calculation replaced analog, purely electronic circuit elements soon replaced their mechanical and electromechanical equivalents. The bipolar junction transistor was invented in 1947. From 1955 onwards, transistors replaced vacuum tubes in computer designs, giving rise to the "second generation" of computers. Compared to vacuum tubes, transistors have many advantages: they are smaller, and require less power than vacuum tubes, so give off less heat. Silicon junction transistors were much more reliable than vacuum tubes and had longer, indefinite, service life. Transistorized computers could contain tens of thousands of binary logic circuits in a relatively compact space.
Semiconductor device
While the device was constructed a week earlier, Brattain's notes describe the first demonstration to higher-ups at Bell Labs on the afternoon of 23 December 1947, often given as the birthdate of the transistor. What is now known as the "p–n–p point-contact germanium transistor" operated as a speech amplifier with a power gain of 18 in that trial. John Bardeen, Walter Houser Brattain, and William Bradford Shockley were awarded the 1956 Nobel Prize in physics for their work.
History of the transistor
An early witness of the phenomenon was Ralph Bray, a young graduate student. He joined the germanium effort at Purdue University in November 1943 and was given the tricky task of measuring the spreading resistance at the metal-semiconductor contact. Bray found a great many anomalies, such as internal high-resistivity barriers in some samples of germanium. The most curious phenomenon was the exceptionally low resistance observed when voltage pulses were applied. This effect remained a mystery because nobody realised, until 1948, that Bray had observed minority carrier injection - the effect that was identified by William Shockley at Bell Labs and made the transistor a reality.
Ferranti Mercury
One team decided to produce a much smaller and more cost-effective system built entirely with transistors. It first ran in November 1953 and is believed to be the first entirely transistor-based computer. Metropolitan-Vickers later built this commercially as the Metrovick 950, delivering seven. At the time, transistors were very expensive, compared to tubes.
History of the transistor
Scientists theorized that silicon would be easier to fabricate, but few bothered to investigate this possibility. Morris Tanenbaum et al. at Bell Laboratories were the first to develop a working silicon transistor on January 26, 1954. A few months later, Gordon Teal, working independently at Texas Instruments, developed a similar device. Both of these devices were made by controlling the doping of single silicon crystals while they were grown from molten silicon. A far superior method was developed by Morris Tanenbaum and Calvin S. Fuller at Bell Laboratories in early 1955 by the gaseous diffusion of donor and acceptor impurities into single crystal silicon chips.
History of hearing aids
Zenith was the first company to realize the problem with transistors was the body heat of individuals. After coming to this conclusion, the first “all-transistor” hearing aids were offered in 1952, called the Microtone Transimatic and the Maico Transist-ear. In 1954, the company, Texas Instruments, produced a silicon transistor, which was much more effective than the previous version. The end of the transistor was marked by the creation of the integrated circuit or IC by Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments in 1958 and the technique was perfected in hearing aids over the next 20 years.
History of the transistor
The first gallium-arsenide Schottky-gate field-effect transistor (MESFET) was made by Carver Mead and reported in 1966.
Single-atom transistor
A single-atom transistor is a device that can open and close an electrical circuit by the controlled and reversible repositioning of one single atom. The single-atom transistor was invented and first demonstrated in 2004 by Prof. Thomas Schimmel and his team of scientists at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (former University of Karlsruhe). By means of a small electrical voltage applied to a control electrode, the so-called "gate electrode", a single silver atom is reversibly moved in and out of a tiny junction, in this way closing and opening an electrical contact.
Telephony
Starting with the introduction of the transistor, invented in 1947 by Bell Laboratories, to amplification and switching circuits in the 1950s, and through development of computer-based electronic switching systems, the public switched telephone network (PSTN) has gradually evolved towards automation and digitization of signaling and audio transmissions.
History of the transistor
Masaru Ibuka, co-founder of the Japanese firm Sony, was visiting the United States when Bell Labs announced the availability of manufacturing licenses, including detailed instructions on how to manufacture junction transistors. Ibuka obtained special permission from the Japanese Ministry of Finance to pay the $50,000 license fee, and in 1955 the company introduced their own five-transistor "coatpocket" radio, the TR-55, under the new brand name Sony. This product was soon followed by more ambitious designs, but it is generally regarded as marking the commencement of Sony's growth into a manufacturing superpower.
Unijunction transistor
The unijunction transistor was invented as a byproduct of research on germanium tetrode transistors at General Electric. It was patented in 1953. Commercially, silicon devices were manufactured.
Diffusion transistor
Texas Instruments made the first grown-junction silicon transistors in 1954. 
The diffused silicon mesa transistor was developed at Bell Labs in 1955 and made commercially available by Fairchild Semiconductor in 1958.
Semiconductor device
The static induction transistor, the first high frequency transistor, was invented by Japanese engineers Jun-ichi Nishizawa and Y. Watanabe in 1950. It was the fastest transistor through to the 1980s.
William Gardner Pfann
Pfann was involved in William Shockley's efforts with Bell Labs to use semiconductors to make devices to replace vacuum tubes. The early efforts used germanium. They made high back-voltage germanium rectifiers in 1945. Pfann devised one of the first point-contact transistors: "Specifically, W.G. Pfann had modified the Western Electric 1N26 shielded point-contact (silicon) diode to include two spring-loaded cat whisker point contacts, making a three-electrode configuration with good electrical amplifying properties. This configuration became known at the Type A transistor." He and Walter Brattain developed the process of "forming" these transistors to make them more uniform. 
Pfann also invented a method of bonding fine gold wires to germanium that made the device functional. "The quiet, unassuming man grew steadily in everyone's esteem as he made one valuable contribution after another to the semiconductor research effort."
Electrons and Holes in Semiconductors with Applications to Transistor Electronics
Electrons and Holes in Semiconductors with Applications to Transistor Electronics is a book by Nobel Prize winner William Shockley, first published in 1950. It was a primary source, and was used as the first textbook, for scientists and engineers learning the new field of semiconductors as applied to the development of the transistor. This was the invention that led to electronic computers, ubiquitous communication devices, compact electronics controllers, and a host of other important inventions of the last half of the twentieth century.
Darlington transistor
Invented in 1953 by Sidney Darlington.
Walter Houser Brattain
On December 23, 1947, Walter Brattain, John Bardeen, and William B. Shockley demonstrated the first working transistor to their colleagues at Bell Laboratories. Amplifying small electrical signals and supporting the processing of digital information, the transistor is "the key enabler of modern electronics". The three men received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1956 "for research on semiconductors and the discovery of the transistor effect."
Digital Revolution
In 1947, the transistor was invented, leading the way to more advanced digital computers. From the late 1940s, Universities, the Military, and Business developed computer systems, to digitally replicate and automate previously manually performed mathematical calculations, with the LEO (computer) being the first commercially available general purpose computer.
Point-contact transistor
The point-contact transistor was the first type of transistor to be successfully demonstrated. It was developed by research scientists John Bardeen and Walter Brattain at Bell Laboratories in December 1947. They worked in a group led by physicist William Shockley. The group had been working together on experiments and theories of electric field effects in solid state materials, with the aim of replacing vacuum tubes with a smaller device that consumed less power.
Semiconductor device
With the fragility problems solved, a remaining problem was purity. Making germanium of the required purity was proving to be a serious problem, and limited the yield of transistors that actually worked from a given batch of material. Germanium's sensitivity to temperature also limited its usefulness. Scientists theorized that silicon would be easier to fabricate, but few investigated this possibility. Gordon K. Teal was the first to develop a working silicon transistor, and his company, the nascent Texas Instruments, profited from its technological edge. From the late 1960s most transistors were silicon-based. Within a few years transistor-based products, most notably easily portable radios, were appearing on the market.
Mailüfterl
Zemanek later said about his project that it was a "semi-illegal" undertaking of an assistant professor, which he and a group of students realized without official authorization, and hence without financial support, from the university. In 1954 he traveled to Philips in the Netherlands, where he asked for a donation in kind. Transistors, invented seven years before and just beginning to be available commercially, were very difficult to obtain in quantity at any price, but Zemanek received a commitment for 1,000 rather slow hearing-aid transistors, and Philips finally shipped a total of 4,000 high-quality transistors to the Austrians.
Music technology (electronic and digital)
The development of the modern synthesizer was spurred on by the invention of the miniaturized transistor in 1947. The lightweight transistors made it was possible to make synthesizers much more portable and complex. A new breed of synthesizers appeared, mainly in America. American inventor Robert Moog's synthesizer designs in the 1960s were a significant advancement in the field over its predecessors. This was partially owed to new technologies that became available, such as the newly developed semiconductors. These new instruments were less expensive and became available worldwide. These were capable of producing a vast range of complex sounds. Later versions often incorporated automatic rhythm units, called drum machines. They had more popularity than any synthesizer from the past. The release of Wendy Carlos' album "Switched-On Bach" in 1968 brought Moog's synthesizer to the general public's attention. The album demonstrated that besides creating strange sounds, the synthesizer could be used to make beautiful music.
History of the transistor
On 16 December 1947, "Using this double point contact, contact was made to a germanium surface that had been anodized to 90 volts, electrolyte washed off in HO and then had some gold spots evaporated on it. The gold contacts were pressed down on the bare surface. Both gold contacts to the surface rectified nicely... The separation between points was about 4x10 cm. One point was used as a grid and the other point as a plate. The bias (D.C.) on the grid had to be positive to get amplification... power gain 1.3 voltage gain 15 on a plate bias of about 15 volts".
History of the transistor
Twelve people are mentioned as directly involved in the invention of the transistor in the Bell Laboratory.
Thyristor
The first thyristor devices were released commercially in 1956. Because thyristors can control a relatively large amount of power and voltage with a small device, they find wide application in control of electric power, ranging from light dimmers and electric motor speed control to high-voltage direct-current power transmission. Thyristors may be used in power-switching circuits, relay-replacement circuits, inverter circuits, oscillator circuits, level-detector circuits, chopper circuits, light-dimming circuits, low-cost timer circuits, logic circuits, speed-control circuits, phase-control circuits, etc. Originally, thyristors relied only on current reversal to turn them off, making them difficult to apply for direct current; newer device types can be turned on and off through the control gate signal. The latter is known as a gate turn-off thyristor, or GTO thyristor. A thyristor is not a proportional device like a transistor. In other words, a thyristor can only be fully on or off, while a transistor can lie in between on and off states. This makes a thyristor unsuitable as an analog amplifier, but useful as a switch.
History of computing hardware
At the University of Manchester, a team under the leadership of Tom Kilburn designed and built a machine using the newly developed transistors instead of valves. Initially the only devices available were germanium point-contact transistors, less reliable than the valves they replaced but which consumed far less power. Their first transistorised computer and the first in the world, was operational by 1953, and a second version was completed there in April 1955. The 1955 version used 200 transistors, 1,300 solid-state diodes, and had a power consumption of 150 watts. However, the machine did make use of valves to generate its 125 kHz clock waveforms and in the circuitry to read and write on its magnetic drum memory, so it was not the first completely transistorized computer.
History of the transistor
The first low-cost junction transistor available to the general public was the CK722, a PNP germanium small signal unit introduced by Raytheon in early 1953 for $7.60 each. In the 1950s and 1960s, hundreds of hobbyist electronics projects based around the CK722 transistor were published in popular books and magazines. Raytheon also participated in expanding the role of the CK722 as a hobbyist electronics device by publishing "Transistor Applications" and "Transistor Applications- Volume 2" during the mid-1950s.
History of the transistor
The Bell team made many attempts to build such a system with various tools, but generally failed. Setups where the contacts were close enough were invariably as fragile as the original cat's whisker detectors had been, and would work briefly, if at all. Eventually they had a practical breakthrough. A piece of gold foil was glued to the edge of a triangular plastic wedge, and then the foil was sliced with a razor at the tip of the triangle. The result was two very closely spaced contacts of gold. When the plastic was pushed down onto the surface of a crystal and voltage applied to the other side (on the base of the crystal), current started to flow from one contact to the other as the base voltage pushed the electrons away from the base towards the other side near the contacts. The point-contact transistor had been invented.
Morris Tanenbaum
Tanenbaum made significant contributions in the fields of transistor development and semiconductor manufacturing. 
Although it was not made public at the time, he developed the first silicon transistor, demonstrating it on January 26, 1954 at Bell Labs. He also helped develop the first gas-diffused silicon transistor, which convinced Bell administrators to support the use of silicon over germanium in their transistor design. He later led a team that developed the first high-field superconducting magnets.
Tom Kilburn
While Kilburn led one design team working on Meg, he led another with Dick Grimsdale and Douglas Webb, on a research project examining what he believed would be the next step forward in computer design: the use of transistors. The 48-bit machine they completed in November 1953 was the world's first transistor computer, with 550 diodes and 92 transistors, and was manufactured by STC. An improved version completed in April 1955 had 1,300 diodes and 200 transistors, and was sold by Metropolitan-Vickers as the Metrovick 950.
John N. Shive
John Northrup Shive (February 22, 1913 – June 1, 1984) was an American physicist and inventor. He made notable contributions in electronic engineering and solid-state physics during the early days of transistor development at Bell Laboratories. In particular, he produced experimental evidence that holes could diffuse through bulk germanium, and not just along the surface as previously thought. This paved the way from Bardeen and Brattain's point-contact transistor to Shockley's more-robust junction transistor. Shive is best known for inventing the phototransistor in 1948 (a device that combines the sensitivity to light of a photodiode and the current gain of a transistor), and for the Shive wave machine in 1959 (an educational apparatus used to illustrate wave motion).
Hearing aid
The first electrical hearing aid used the carbon microphone of the telephone and was introduced in 1896. The vacuum tube made electronic amplification possible, but early versions of amplified hearing aids were too heavy to carry around. Miniaturization of vacuum tubes lead to portable models, and after World War II, wearable models using miniature tubes. The transistor invented in 1948 was well suited to the hearing aid application due to low power and small size; hearing aids were an early adopter of transistors. The development of integrated circuits allowed further improvement of the capabilities of wearable aids, including implementation of digital signal processing techniques and programmability for the individual user's needs.
DRTE Computer
In the early 1950s transistors had not yet replaced vacuum tubes in most electronics. Tubes varied widely in their actual characteristics from tube to tube even of the same model. Engineers had developed techniques to ensure that the overall circuit was not overly sensitive to these changes so they could be replaced without causing trouble. The same techniques had not yet been developed for transistor-based systems, they were simply too new. While smaller circuits could be "hand tuned" to work, larger systems using many transistors were not well understood. At the same time transistors were still expensive; a tube cost about $0.75 while a similar transistor cost about $8. This limited the amount of experimentation most companies were able to perform.
Milton Feng
Reported in the January 5 issue of the journal Applied Physics Letters in 2004, Milton Feng and Nick Holonyak, the inventor of the first practical light-emitting diode (LED) and the first semiconductor laser to operate in the visible spectrum, made the world's first light-emitting transistor. This hybrid device, fabricated by Feng's graduate student Walid Hafez, had one electrical input and two outputs (electrical output and optical output) and operated at a frequency of 1 MHz. The device was made of indium gallium phosphide, indium gallium arsenide, and gallium arsenide, and emitted infrared photons from the base layer.
History of the transistor
The static induction transistor, the first high frequency transistor concept, was invented by Japanese engineers Jun-ichi Nishizawa and Y. Watanabe in 1950, and was finally able to produce some experimental prototypes in 1975. It was the fastest transistor through to the 1980s.
Invention of the integrated circuit
The invention of the transistor in 1947 led to the expectation of a new technological revolution. Fiction writers and journalists heralded the imminent appearance of "intelligent machines" and robotization of all aspects of life. Although transistors did reduce the size and power consumption, they could not solve the problem of reliability of complex electronic devices. On the contrary, dense packing of components in small devices hindered their repair. While the reliability of discrete components was brought to the theoretical limit in the 1950s, there was no improvement in the connections between the components.
History of the transistor
Shockley was upset about the device being credited to Brattain and Bardeen, who he felt had built it "behind his back" to take the glory. Matters became worse when Bell Labs lawyers found that some of Shockley's own writings on the transistor were close enough to those of an earlier 1925 patent by Julius Edgar Lilienfeld that they thought it best that his name be left off the patent application.
History of electromagnetic theory
William Stanley made the first public demonstration of a transformer that enabled commercial delivery of alternating current in 1886. Large two-phase alternating current generators were built by a British electrician, J. E. H. Gordon, in 1882. Lord Kelvin and Sebastian Ferranti also developed early alternators, producing frequencies between 100 and 300 hertz. After 1891, polyphase alternators were introduced to supply currents of multiple differing phases. Later alternators were designed for varying alternating-current frequencies between sixteen and about one hundred hertz, for use with arc lighting, incandescent lighting and electric motors.
Tyranny of numbers
The first known recorded use of the term in this context was made by the Vice President of Bell Labs in an article celebrating the 10th anniversary of the invention of the transistor, for the "Proceedings of the IRE" (Institute of Radio Engineers), June 1958 . Referring to the problems many designers were having, he wrote:
Philco
The Philco Transac models S-1000 scientific computer and S-2000 electronic data processing computer, were the first commercially produced large-scale all transistor computers, which were introduced in 1957. It used discrete surface barrier transistors instead of vacuum tubes (as the integrated circuit had not yet been invented). It also used a fast adder, originally invented by Bruce Gilchrist, James H. Pomerene and Y.K. Wong of the Institute for Advanced Study. It incorporated a speed up technique for asynchronous adders reducing the time for additive carry-overs to propagate.
Karl Lark-Horovitz
Karl Lark-Horovitz (July 20, 1892 – 1958) was an American physicist known for his pioneering work in solid-state physics that played a role in the invention of the transistor. He brought the previously neglected Physics Department at Purdue University to prominence during his tenure there as department head from 1929 until his death in 1958.
Transistor
The first "prototype" pocket transistor radio was shown by INTERMETALL (a company founded by Herbert Mataré in 1952) at the "Internationale Funkausstellung Düsseldorf" between August 29, 1953 and September 9, 1953.
Timeline of United States inventions (1946–1991)
1947 Transistor
History of the transistor
The world’s first transistor computer was built at the University of Manchester in November 1953. The computer was built by Richard Grimsdale, then a research student in the Department of Electrical Engineering and later a Professor of Electronic Engineering at Sussex University. The machine used point-contact transistors, made in small quantities by STC and Mullard. These consisted of a single crystal of germanium with two fine wires, resembling the crystal and cat’s whisker of the 1920s. These transistors had the useful property that a single transistor could possess two stable states. ... The development of the machine was severely hampered by the unreliability of the transistors, which consumed 150 watts.
Regency TR-1
The Regency TR-1 was the first commercially manufactured transistor radio. First sold in 1954, it was a novelty due to small size and portability; about 150,000 units were sold despite mediocre performance. The device demonstrated the use of transistors for consumer electronics; previously transistors had only been used in military or industrial applications. Surviving specimens are sought out by collectors.
James L. Buie
Buie invented transistor-to-transistor logic circuitry ("TTL") in 1961 leading to the development of the integrated circuit industry. Buie's technology technique was originally known as transistor-coupled transistor logic – TCTL. The TTL electronics invented by Buie became the electronics industry standard for two decades. The first commercial integrated circuit products using the TTL technology were made by Sylvania in 1963
and known as the Sylvania Universal High-Level Logic family.
Electrolytic capacitor
The relevant development of solid electrolyte tantalum capacitors began some years after William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Houser Brattain invented the transistor in 1947. It was invented by Bell Laboratories in the early 1950s as a miniaturized, more reliable low-voltage support capacitor to complement their newly invented transistor. The solution found by R. L. Taylor and H. E. Haring of the Bell labs in early 1950 was based on experiences with ceramics. They ground tantalum to a powder, which they pressed into a cylindrical form and then sintered at high a temperature between 1500 and 2000 °C under vacuum conditions to produce a pellet ("slug").
Invention of the integrated circuit
The above logic ICs were built from standard components, with sizes and configurations defined by the technological process, and all the diodes and transistors on one IC were of the same type. The use of different transistor types was first proposed by Tom Long at Sylvania in 1961–1962. In late 1962, Sylvania launched the first family of transistor-transistor logic (TTL) ICs, which became a commercial success. Bob Widlar from Fairchild made a similar breakthrough in 1964–1965 in analog ICs (operational amplifiers).