Tuesday, January 6, 2009

The Discovery of the Transistor

The transistor was invented at Bell Laboratories in December 1947 (not in 1948 as is often stated) by John Bardeen and Walter Brattain. 'Discovered' would be a better word, for although they were seeking a solid-state equivalent to the vacuum tube, it was found accidentally during the investigation of the surface states around a diode point-contact. The first transistors were therefore of the point-contact type. William Shockley, the theorist who was leading the research, knew at once that this was not what he was seeking: at the time he was trying to create a solid-state device similar to what we now call a junction field-effect transistor (JFET).

more

No comments: