The first transistor was about half an inch high. That's mammoth by today's standards, when 7 million transistors can fit on a single computer chip. It was nevertheless an amazing piece of technology.

In What’s the point?: The Point Contact transistor I discussed Shockley’s white paper on the theory of the Point Contact Transistor. Let’s look further into this early transistor design. It is ...

Bell Laboratories, one of the world’s largest industrial laboratories and now part of Lucent Technologies, was originally the research and development arm of the giant telephone company American ...

Transistors are tiny electronic components that act as switches and amplifiers, and they dwell at the heart of modern technology. In simple terms, a transistor can turn a flow of electricity on or off ...

Transistors come in different flavors. Tubes used an electric field to regulate current flow, and researchers wanted to find something that worked the same way without the drawbacks like vacuum and ...

NATURE ABHORS A vacuum tube," cracked Bell Labs physicist John Pierce. So did almost everyone else by the 1940s. Sure, vacuum tubes boosted the power of the phone network's electrical signals, which ...

Beyond the power variant, it sometimes seems as though we rarely encounter a discrete transistor these days, such has been the advance of integrated electronics. But they have a rich history, going ...

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Bell Laboratories, one of the world’s largest industrial laboratories and now part of Lucent Technologies, was originally the research and development arm of the giant telephone company American ...

In his 1948 white paper 1, Shockley wrote, “The theory of the point-contact transistor is that the emitter point-contact introduces holes into the n-type base material. The collector point-contact, ...