The Transistor, Fundamental Component of Integrated Circuits
D The transistor, fundamental component of integrated circuits he first transistor was made in (SiO2), which serves as an insulator. The transistor, a name derived from Tgermanium by John Bardeen and In 1958, Jack Kilby invented the inte- transfer and resistor, is a fundamen- Walter H. Brattain, in December 1947. grated circuit by manufacturing 5 com- tal component of microelectronic inte- The year after, along with William B. ponents on the same substrate. The grated circuits, and is set to remain Shockley at Bell Laboratories, they 1970s saw the advent of the first micro- so with the necessary changes at the developed the bipolar transistor and processor, produced by Intel and incor- nanoelectronics scale: also well-sui- the associated theory. During the porating 2,250 transistors, and the first ted to amplification, among other func- 1950s, transistors were made with sili- memory. The complexity of integrated tions, it performs one essential basic con (Si), which to this day remains the circuits has grown exponentially (dou- function which is to open or close a most widely-used semiconductor due bling every 2 to 3 years according to current as required, like a switching to the exceptional quality of the inter- “Moore's law”) as transistors continue device (Figure). Its basic working prin- face created by silicon and silicon oxide to become increasingly miniaturized. ciple therefore applies directly to pro- cessing binary code (0, the current is blocked, 1 it goes through) in logic cir- control gate cuits (inverters, gates, adders, and memory cells). The transistor, which is based on the switch source drain transport of electrons in a solid and not in a vacuum, as in the electron gate tubes of the old triodes, comprises three electrodes (anode, cathode and gate), two of which serve as an elec- transistor source drain tron reservoir: the source, which acts as the emitter filament of an electron gate insulator tube, the drain, which acts as the col- source lector plate, with the gate as “control- gate drain ler”.
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