In 1954, Texas Instruments introduced the silicon transistor, made of a material that was even more rugged and reliable than germanium. Meanwhile, transistor development continued at a rapid pace. Bardeen later won a second Nobel Prize for that work. Shockley went on to become an entrepreneur in the transistor manufacturing business, while Bardeen became a professor and worked on superconductors. Soon, they were used in hearing aids, portable radios, and all sorts of other electronic devices.īardeen, Brattain, and Shockley were awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 1956 for their groundbreaking work. Transistors were perfect for these military systems, because they were much smaller and used much less electrical current than vacuum tubes. The military began using junction transistors almost immediately in airplanes and missiles, where engineers were trying to squeeze in complicated communication and guidance systems. The first germanium junction transistors were introduced around 1950, and engineers quickly developed many different ways of making them so that they were cheaper, more useful, and easier to make in large quantities. It acts like a tiny hand on an electrical spigot. By creating a sandwich of three different layers, the middle layer can be electrically stimulated so that it can affect the flow of electricity from the top to the bottom layers. The impurities and junctions change the way that the crystal conducts electricity. The transistions between the regions are known as junctions. A junction transistor consists of a single piece of semiconductor crystal, into which chemical impurities have been introduced to create three chemically different regions. Shockley suggested a new design almost immediately, which became known as the junction transistor. It was difficult to make and the early models often failed unexpectedly. They found a new way to connect the germanium crystal to a circuit that allowed it to amplify current.Īfter a little brainstorming and an office poll, the new device was named the “transistor,” which was short for “transfer resistor.” The point-contact transistor, as it was called, worked, but not very well. Walter Brattain and John Bardeen returned to the idea in the middle 1940s. Brattain and Shockley believed that they could modify the diode so that they could regulate the current the same way the grid in an electron tube regulates current. When the “cat’s whisker” is adjusted correctly, the diode acts as a one-way valve for electric current. Germanium and other semiconductors had been used for many years in point-contact diodes, which consist of a small sample of semiconductor crystal with a permanent electrical connection at one end and an adjustable connection at the other. In 1939, Brattain and Shockley began to work together on an electron tube replacement made of the chemical element germanium, a semiconductor. The inventors of the point-contact germanium transistor were John Bardeen, and Walter Brattain, who worked under William Shockley, at Bell Telephone Laboratories in New Jersey. The electron tube was based on the light bulb, so it was big, fragile, and created a lot of excess heat. The transistor got its start in the 1940s when engineers began looking for a replacement for the electron tube, an earlier device for amplification and switching. They use specially prepared substances to do this, and are used individually or in clusters of up to several million on integrated circuits. Transistors are devices that switch electric currents on and off or amplify electric currents. Today, when we refer to electronics, we are usually referring to things containing transistors.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |